The con call is long and difficult and not at all like the feel of Sigmund’s lips or the taste of his self-conscious lust, meaning that my mind’s not so much on the work as it is on him. On the coarse feel of his hair and sharp scent of his soap, on the softness of his flesh and the hesitance of his embrace.
He’s not a great kisser. Unpracticed. But that can be fixed, with time, and I’d be lying if I said the thought of plucking open his awkward virginity wasn’t something I was looking forward to, the very best kind of déjà vu.
By modern standards, Sigyn had been young when we’d married. Young and mortal, caught in the firestorm of the most capricious of the gods. But she’d devoured the apple and taken to her place in Ásgarðr with a ferocity unmatched across the heavens, and the whole Nine Realms had been the rubes and patsies for our mayhem.
Funny how none of those stories made it down the ages. Wicked Loki and loyal Sigyn, victorious and terrible, filled with such rage and compassion as to unmake the Wyrd itself.
Sigmund isn’t Sigyn, but he could’ve been, in a different time and different skin. Now his seed cracks open in the wake of a new inferno, and I revel in the opportunity to watch his leaves unfurl and his branches reach up to grasp the heavens. A new consort for a new era, a new god for a new land. And a new me, standing by his side.
It will be glorious.
So will sucking Sigmund until he screams, which is another thing I’m looking forward to doing at some point in the future. On top of Travis’s desk, perhaps, looking out over the city—our city—driving Sigmund’s ecstasy down into the very bones of Pandemonium. Imprinting it into concrete and steel and glass.
I make a note on my To-Do list, scheduling it somewhere down the line. Not today, though. We’re not quite at the mind-blowing-city-altering sex phase of our relationship just yet. More like the awkward-hand-holding lunch-date phase, and so I arrange to meet Sigmund in the bookstore in the mall at one o’clock for exactly that. There’s a pho place just downstairs that I think he’d like, or, failing that, we can have our pick of one of the million other cafés that have sprung up along Torr Row like hipster cancer. It’s lunchtime, but reservations are things that happen to other people.
When I get there, the mall is covered in yellow tape and security barricades, and it takes me a moment to realize all the blocked-off entrances lead down to the parking garage. The one I set on fire the other week. Oops.
People don’t seem too perturbed, though. Whatever spin story the mall’s owners put out for the fire evidently didn’t contain the word terrorism, and thus does commerce march blithely on.
The bookstore, an Angus & Robertson, is wedged at the end of one of Torr Mall’s newer wings, in between a Pyre Computers store and a movie theater. The shop’s not small—two floors sprawling back into the building—and I can feel Sigmund upstairs, trying to calm his nerves by browsing the hyperbolic covers of the sci-fi/fantasy section. I lope my way past the front of the store, past the magazines and the stationery, and up to the escalators at the back.
I’m halfway between floors when the shift happens.
I don’t feel it, at first, though I certainly feel the way the escalators shudder to a halt and the overhead lights flicker off.
“What the . . . ?”
In the space between breaths, the store is plunged into blackness. And I’m not talking like, oh-the-lights-are-off blackness. I’m talking really, serious, cannot-see-a-fucking-thing blackness. And, y’know, technically I’ve been blind since the cave—I don’t use my eyes to see, that is, all the working parts having long since burnt away—but this blackness gets even me. A total void of senses for a second, maybe less, and when the world reboots . . .
Oh. Oh, this is bad. This is what the map meant this morning. Fuck.
We’ve been hit by a Helbleed.
Bleeds aren’t all that uncommon. There are two around Pandemonium alone, which is the reason I moved here in the first place. It’s the rubber sheet analogy again: A Bleed is when that sheet gets stretched a bit too thin, and tiny holes start appearing. Tiny holes that let parts of the Outyards, the Útgarðar, bleed through into Mannheim.
And like I said, Pandemonium has two. One at Woolridge Reserve, leading to Jötunheimr, and a second on Golgotha Hill, leading to Niflhel.
When the lights come back—sickly, pale, and flickering—it becomes apparent that the latter is my current problem.
The mall is dead silent. Literally. And that’s worrying, because malls are never silent. But mortals walk right over the top of Bleeds, and the things that are native to Niflhel don’t, as a general rule, make a lot of noise.
At first.
And all this would be fine—annoying, but fine—if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not currently the only Wyrdborn thing in the store.
I’m vaulting up the broken escalators before I’ve even finished the narration. The metal ridges have turned sharp and rusted, and they rip through Lain’s thin-soled hipster shoes like talons. That’s okay, though, because my wards are burning and it’s becoming very difficult to hold on to Lain’s human form.
So I don’t. I let it go, feeling the horns erupt from my skull and the claws from the tips of my fingers. By the time I’ve hit the top of the escalators, my legs have changed, and my only concessions to modesty are my own feathers and a single leather wrist-cuff that, for some reason, survived the transformation.
The top floor is deeper into the Bleed, and the nihilism of the void carpets everything in ash and mold. Books are stacked haphazardly all over the floor, and when my tail brushes against a pile, it disintegrates into pulp and scurrying things it’s probably best to think of as cockroaches.
There’s something here. I can hear it, shuffling and gurgling, and I leap up onto the tops of the tall shelves in the reference section to get a better view.
Perched like a garish, fiery (and book-loving) gargoyle, I can see Sigmund, nose deep in a paperback and oblivious to the change in the world around him. That doesn’t make the draugr in the next row over any less threatening.
I vault across the tops of the shelves and drop down in the space between Naomi Novik and Terry Pratchett. Sigmund stifles a scream when he sees me, then another when he sees the Bleed, then a third when he sees the shambling, unformed mass behind me.
“Lain, behin—”
But I’ve already turned, and by the time he’s finished his sentence my claw is sticking through the back of the draugr’s skull. Or what probably used to be a skull, at some point.
The draugr—dead now twice over—gives a gurgling moan and falls to the floor. Then begins oozing into an amorphous pile on the carpet. I feel Sigmund’s fingers close around my biceps, and he chokes back bile as he peers around my side. “Oh . . . oh, Jesus.” He covers his mouth with his free hand, eyes closed as he wills himself not to hurl.
Not that it would make much of a difference to the decor, and what’s a little upchuck on the feathers when I’ve already got mushed draugr brain up to my elbow. I set fire to my filth-covered arm, the flames green and putrid as they burn the gunk from my skin. It’s unpleasant, but over quickly, and when it clears I’m clean once more.
Handy.
Sigmund is pressed up against me, looking around the ruins of the bookstore, oozing his own oil slick of terror. “Wh-what the hell was that?” he stammers. “What the h-hell happened to the sh-shop?” His heart and breath race, his emotions an unpleasant metallic tang in the back of my throat.
“That,” I say, “was a draugr.”
He knows the word, sort of. “A z-zombie?”
I shrug, shifting my arms to pull Sigmund closer. His comparison is not completely inaccurate. Draugar are memories who’ve lost themselves. Who haven’t managed to form enough of an identity to wind up as einherjar or one of the denizens of Helheimr. They’re shambling piles of neuroses and fears, hatreds and obsessions. The vermin scurrying between the roots of the Tree.
I sum this up for Sigmund, more or less, then say, “We’re stuck in a Helbleed. A thin spot between Miðgarðr and Niflhel.”
“The mall was full of people!”
“Who are fine.” Probably. “Bleeds are only dangerous to things touched by the Wyrd. Or born in it.”
Sigmund blinks behind his glasses, looking around the tattered shelves, atavistic revulsion sending a tremble through his limbs.
“Try not to read the titles of the books,” I suggest, and he shudders. “It looks worse than it really is.”
“Except for the horrible monsters trying to kill me!”
“It probably wasn’t trying to kill you, exactly. Draugar are more like rats than tigers.” Honestly, it’s hard to say what your average draugr wants, other than to follow some loathsome instinct to seek out the living. When they find one, usually all they do is stand around and moan. Problem is, like rats, draugar carry disease. Not physical diseases, but a kind of seeping malaise of the soul. And they do bite. Sometimes.
“J-Jesus,” Sigmund says. It occurs to me, as I feel him force stillness back into his breath, that Sigmund is mortal, and for a second I see flashes behind my milky eyes. Of teeth and blades and spikes and chains. Of soft dark flesh, pulped and split beneath the onslaught.
The stitches pull as my lips curl back, exposing a bright and jagged maw to any who would dare.
“We need to get out of here,” I say, snarl lurking beneath the words. I scan around the shop lest any other draugar wander near. If they do, we’ll see just how well they burn.
“Y-yes, please.”
“C’mon, we need to find a path.” I press my hand against the small of Sigmund’s back, urging him forward.
“Oh.” He stumbles when he tries to move, legs stiff and shaking. His disappointment is a cloying yellow fog, thick and reeking in the unreality of the Outyards. He was hoping I’d just be able to magic us out of here at will.
I start walking toward the shop entrance. Sigmund follows me, hand sliding down to grasp my own.
“So,” he says, “d-does this sort of thing h-happen to you often?” The humor is thin, but, in this place, even thin armor is better than going naked.
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“Surprisingly no,” I say. I avoid the Bleeds. Avoid the eyes that might be watching, away from the safety of my self-made prison. “It’s been pretty dull since I got out.” And for the thousand-odd years before that, too. Even the screaming agony became routine, eventually.
“This . . . this is Baldr, then?”
“Bingo.” Bleeds are natural, and Sigmund’s been in one before, even if he didn’t realize at the time. We didn’t get lost in the forest the other week because the map was wrong; it just wasn’t the map of where we were.
The Helbleed touches Pandemonium on Golgotha Hill, the huge, barren monstrosity everyone in town assumes is a slag heap left over from the town’s mining days. They’re not wrong, but that’s not the reason nothing grows up in the shale, not the reason the suburb around it is the poster child for urban decay. Golgotha Hill is the natural Bleed. Its single feature, a lone, dead ash tree, is an extension of the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasill.
But that Bleed doesn’t extend much farther than the Hill itself, and it’s not this deep or this unstable.
This, what we’re in right now? This is a Wound, a forced Bleed, and it’s spread out over the entire city in the space of roughly half a day. That’s not good. There’s only one thing I can think of that would cause such a chronic breakdown of the boundaries between realms, and the next time I see Baldr?
He’s a dead man. Again.
When we get to the broken escalators, I stop. “I’ll need to carry you down,” I tell Sigmund. My feet still hurt from running up in the first place.
Sigmund doesn’t protest, but makes a squeaking noise as I pick him up in a bridal carry.
“This is not very manly,” he says, pushing his glasses up his nose and trying on a laugh.
“Sigmund,” I say, “you are looking at the queen of unmanly. Believe me, this doesn’t even register.” The word is ergi, and it’s a kind of Níð. A kind I specialized in.
Sigmund worries about his own masculinity, or supposed lack thereof. About his soft belly and lack of interest in manly things, like cars and protein shakes. About his friends, the feminist and the misandrist, who see him as One of the Girls.
About the fact that he used to be a goddess.
Goddess or not, I don’t want Sigmund’s feet ripped to shreds on the rusted stairs, and I’m not enthused about it happening to mine, either. So I run us down the handrails in the middle. The rubber has liquefied, and it oozes between my toes in thick and sticky strands.
I put Sigmund down when we reach the bottom, and he goes back to lacing his fingers through my claws. He stands close against my side, eyes darting from shadow to shadow, afraid of every monster in this place but one.
The draugar don’t share Sigmund’s comfort. A few more shamble around the bookstore’s bottom floor, but they’re wary of me and don’t approach. Sig’s second hand comes up to grasp my arm as we walk, his white-knuckled grip tearing small feathers from the skin. When I touch him, he startles, turning to look at me with white-ringed eyes as I say, “Relax. I’m the scariest thing here. They won’t get closer.”
He swallows. “It’s just . . . They’re so . . .” But his fingers loosen, just a little.
“I know,” I say. Sigmund hates himself for being cowardly, so I add, “You know Pandemonium used to be called Eden, back in the twenties?”
“Y-yeah,” he says. “They changed the name after some miners went nuts and k-killed most of the rest of the town.”
Killed is certainly the family-viewing explanation. “Right,” I say. “Because those guys? Dug into the Helbleed. Ten minutes in this place and they were ready to slaughter the entire town. You’re doing fine.”
Sigmund gives a morbid chuckle, more an exhalation than a laugh. “Thanks,” he says. “But I’ve got you. I bet those miners didn’t have a god to hide behind.” He thinks for a moment, then, “Well, maybe in an allegoric . . . Ah, bugger.”
This last because the entrance to the store is now visible through the haze. The extremely closed entrance to the store.
We walk closer, and I study the doors. They’re stock-standard mall roller doors, except with more rust and razor wire. I give one an experimental kick. The metal screams.
“Um!” Sigmund utters what is possibly the most startled polite interjection ever. “I don’t think it liked that.”
“There should be some kind of staff entrance around here somewhere.” I peer around, trying not to look at the fleshy, writhing sacks chained behind the counter; the sloughed-off anxiety and hopelessness of a thousand different clerks.
“Oh!” says Sigmund. “This way.” He tugs me back into the shelves. “I worked here once in high school for, like, two minutes.”
“Not a fan, then?”
“Let’s just say there’s a reason I have a degree and a desk job, and it’s not because I was dying to follow in Dad’s footsteps.”
We have to avoid the YA section due to impenetrable emotional trauma, but we route back via audiobooks and eventually I catch sight of Sigmund’s exit. It, too, is blocked, but this time with a pallid membrane that splits easily beneath my claws.
Behind the now-open door lurks not some horrific back room from Hel, but rather the actual Really Real World store, as if we were looking out rather than in.
“That’s promising?” Sigmund suggests.
“Yes,” I say, ushering him forward. “After you.” No way am I leaving Sigmund alone in this place, even if only for a moment. In Niflhel, the line between death and isolation is really very thin.
Heart pounding but trying to appear brave, he steps through the doorway. I follow him. On the other side we do, indeed, find ourselves back in the Really Real World. People bustle all around us, more intent on procuring books and related products than paying attention to two Gen-Y hipsters who may as well be off-duty staff.
“There you go.” I punch Sigmund in the shoulder, light and playful. “You survived your first Helbleed.” I’m not sure if it’s more my relief or his. Fucking Baldr.
Sigmund blinks, expecting to see his giant feathered godmonster, and is a bit thrown when I turn out to be just Lain again. “It’s the ‘first’ part of that sentence that worries me,” he says as we start making our way to the (open, unobstructed) exit. “So what do we do now?”
“Now, we have that lunch.”
Sigmund gives me an incredulous look. “Don’t you, like, have to do something about the thingie?” He means the Wound.
“I am doing something,” I say. “I’m grieving. Right now, that’s all I can do.” Fixing a Wound this large is not trivial, and I don’t have the power to just snap my fingers and do it. At the moment I’m not even sure how to do it. What I am sure of, however, is the shake Sigmund can’t quite force from his fingers, or the way he not quite jumps at every noise. Taking care of my city—taking care of my enemies—is one thing.
Taking care of my lover is something else again.
----------------------------------------
We end up going for pho, as planned. Sigmund is anxious and jumpy the whole time, but I manage to distract him by flirting with the waitress. She gives me her number. I give her a tip, left beneath an upside-down glass still filled with water, and her outraged shriek echoes all the way across Torr Row.
“That was cruel,” Sigmund says, but he’s laughing.
“No,” I say, “flirting with me when I’m obviously there with you is cruel.”
“Maybe she didn’t realize that?” That’s the thing about Sigmund: He’s good-hearted. Sigyn was too, at first. Look where it got her.
We’re crossing Diamond Square on our way back to LB when we hear a voice behind us call, “Sigmund!”
It’s Wayne Murphy, an explosion of pink and black, of leather and lace, among the beige of hipsters and office drones. Murphy’s sitting on one of the square’s metal beanbag sculptures, eating sushi out of a plastic bento and waving at us with her chopsticks.
Sigmund wanders over to say hi, I follow behind. It’s stinking hot and sweat-drenchingly humid, dark clouds rolling overhead and the square filled with people determined to brave lunch outside before the storm breaks.
Murphy gives us a huge grin when we walk up, bright against dark skin and darker lipstick. “Hey, dooder,” she says to Sigmund. “Who let you out of the office?”
“Him,” says Sigmund, pointing over his shoulder at me. “Then we got sucked into a hell dimension and nearly died.”
I’ve apparently missed a conversation, because Murphy’s reaction to this is to turn to me and say, “You’d better be keeping him safe, you hear me?” It’s definitely a threat, accompanied by the tugging sense of déjà vu.
“ ‘Nearly died’ is a decided overstatement.”
Murphy’s suspicion tastes like rotten feathers as she sizes me up against what she thinks she knows of who I am.
“I can kind of see it,” she tells Sigmund. “I mean, you’d never guess, but . . . I thought he’d be shorter.”
“I’m a giant!” I snap. “We’re not called giants because we’re short!” This is not entirely true. I used to be short, back in Ásgarðr. It’s an affectation I feel under no obligation to continue in the modern world.
The pair make small talk in the space around me. Something about Ivanovich, something about DnD, something about Murphy’s mum, something about this thing Sigmund totally saw on the Internet the other day and ohmigawd it was just the funniest thing ever.
I’m not really there. Instead, I’m feeling out over the city—between the pavement and the pipes, across the minds of students and of salarymen—looking for the Bleed. It’s all over the place, scattered like blood drops, an oozing red stain of wartime propaganda. Golgotha is bad, of course—much deeper than usual, nearly dangerous to mortals—but there are other patches, too, in places that shouldn’t Bleed. Whitebread middle-class suburbia, like Aldershot and North Eden, plus the one that’s currently crawling through Torr Mall.
That’s not good.
Like I said, Bleeds usually occupy a space beneath the one mortals live in. They’re a part of Miðgarðr, not Mannheimr. But they’re called “Bleeds” for a reason, and humans can feel them, even if they don’t know what it is they’re feeling. A low-grade miasma of ennui and apathy might not make much of an impact on the hipsters and store clerks of the local Angus & Robertson, but the size of the Bleed exacerbates its effects. And to have one growing so close to Lokabrenna . . .
“Lain?”
“Huh?” I snap back to Diamond Square in a cacophony of the sounds and stink of the lunchtime rush. I blink. My tattoo itches.
Sigmund radiates curious concern, cool and smooth and green. “You all right? You looked kinda zoned out.”
It occurs to me that Murphy has gone. I wonder how long I’ve been staring off into space.
“Yeah, sorry,” I say. “I was miles away.”
“Oh, well . . . We should probably get back.” Sigmund doesn’t sound happy about the idea, and I squeeze his hand.
“Hey, I got the new Savage Turbine alpha up in my office. Reckon it needs some play testing if you’re up for it. I haven’t had the time, and the dev team is getting antsy.”
That does the trick. “Turbine 3?” Sigmund asks, a new gleam of hope and wonder scratching through the tarnish of the Bleed. “That’s not due out for like six months.”
I grin, deciding to take that as a yes. The perks of being a CEO: distracting your boyfriend with prerelease AAA megatitles. It’s good to be me.
The walk back to LB is amiable, if humid. By the time we’re on campus, it’s started to rain, and I dash up the stairs and into the foyer, watching Sigmund follow me at his own pace.
“I can practically see your tail flicking from here,” he says when he catches up. His glasses are covered in water drops and I’ve got no idea how he’s seeing through all of that.
“Hey, water’s not my fucking thing, okay?” I say as we cross the foyer and head toward the elevators.
“Evidently not.” Sigmund laughs, but it’s fraying.
His affected calm lasts all the way back into the office. Nic ambushes me outside with a folio of papers, but I give her a meaningful look of Not now, as I usher Sigmund through the doors. Instead, I sit him down on the couch, hand him a controller for the Inferno, then turn to boot it and the TV up. By the time I’ve looked back, Sigmund is shaking, staring down at the controller in his hand as if he’s never seen one before. When he blinks, tears hit the plastic.
I take the controller from his fingers and put it back on the coffee table. Then I pull him against my chest, surrounding him in the feeling of warmth and safety and home.
He doesn’t say anything. I know he wants to. This close, I can feel his internal narration seethe across the surface of his mind, heavy-handed with themes of shame and self-loathing. He hates that he’s not better at this, that he’s not braver, stronger. Hates that this is the second time now I’ve seen him cry, because even though he pretends to reject them, the rules for Be a Man and Stop Crying You Pussy are so ingrained that they’re practically bursting him at the seams.
So I say, “You’re doing fine, Sig. Helbleeds are rough. I don’t like them either.” I try not to think of the glistening masses of unformed resentment, slumped behind the counter in the Bleedside Angus & Robertson.
Sigmund’s voice is weak and thready, coming from somewhere underneath the edge of my jacket. “You-you’re not . . . you’re not—”
“I know,” I say, “but I’ve have a long time to get used to it. A really long time. And getting used to something like that? Isn’t necessarily that great a thing, you know? I’ve certainly done my share of fetal crying on the floor.” Fuck, have I ever. Sigyn was there to get me through a lot of it, all soft hands and clean bandages. The least I can do is return the favor.
Sigmund nods. Still shaky, but his fingers unwind from my T-shirt, just a fraction. “Is i-it all like that? A-all so . . . so . . . ?”
“No,” I say. “Just Niflhel. I mean, it’s not called the misty hell because it’s full of campfires and kumbaya, you know? It’s not even the first Bleed you’ve been to. Remember the other week when we got lost at Woolridge? That’s because you wandered into the Járnviðr Bleed. You were about a day’s hike away from the edge of Jötunheimr. That wasn’t so bad, right? You didn’t even notice.” I decide not to mention the giant spiders.
Sigmund nods, putting two and two together to come up with the realization that it really wasn’t his map-reading skills that got us lost.
“Most of the realms are more like Járnvidr,” I say, just filling the space up with words. “There’s Jötunheimr, where I’m from. No human has ever been there”—well, voluntarily, and they don’t stay human for long—“but it’s a massive city, cut out of the top of a mountain rising from the center of the Járnvidr. It’s all glistening spires and Better Living Through Magic, and the drekar—the dragons—circle endlessly overhead.” Sigmund starts imagining it, and I touch up his mental image a little. It’s been nearly an eternity since I’ve been back there, but I still remember it. You don’t forget a place like that.
“Then there’s Niflheimr and Múspellsheimr, the primordial realms of ice and fire, void and chaos. Where they meet, in Ginnungagap, the world is formed. Grown upon a great ash tree, the Yggdrasill, with three mighty roots and branches big enough to hold the sky. Beneath one root lies Mímisbrunnr, a well, where one can drink and learn great wisdom . . . for a great price. And there are rivers, Sig. Greater than you can imagine. And all spring from the same source, Hvergelmir, which bubbles beneath . . .” And so on, and so forth.
I spend the next half hour or so filling in the cosmology. Sigmund listens, rapt, for as long as he can, but eventually the day catches up with him and he falls asleep in my arms.