He picked up on the first ring. “Oh thank Odin’s hairy balls,” Theo blurted the moment he picked up. “Masaaki stirred up a hornet’s nest. Police everywhere. Turns out he put that fancy new sword through the counter when they told him they weren’t going to chop the onions for him as he watched, and it fried all the cameras in a two-mile radius. The sandwich shop guys are saying the sword was so bright they don’t remember what the guys looked like, aside from one was wearing a kimono and looked Asian. Where are you?”

“I’m in Anchorage,” Bonnie said. “I just got attacked by the Inquisition and…” she hesitated telling someone she murdered people over a cell phone line. “…it wasn’t pretty.”

“The Inquisition? Fuck. Hold on.” She heard Theo talk to someone on the other end briefly, then said, “Don’t go back to any house or apartment you’ve lived before. They’ll be watching those places, waiting for you to pop back up. Get a new phone number, not attached to any of your current plans. Burner phone from Wal-Mart. Withdraw cash from the bank, don’t use cards. If they’re not tracking you right now, they will be soon.”

Bonnie listened to all of that on her brand-new, fancy, every-bell-and-whistle phone that she had just spent two hours getting downloaded, synched, personalized, and otherwise attached to and she just stopped hearing him. He continued, but her mind was already checked out, no longer processing. Once she got tired of Theo telling her how to avoid all of the Inquisition guys she had just killed, she cut him off with, “Björn’s loose in Willow somewhere. I’ve gotta go find him after my first appointment with my shrink.”

Theo hesitated in telling her about triangulation and military-grade tracking devices. “What shrink?”

“The one Björn abducted, almost killed, and turned into some sort of supernatural psychologist.”

“Who’s Björn?”

“Björn’s the barghest you told me not to buy from the slavers. Good call, by the way. He broke my house and set three million dollars in precious metals on fire to summon some Valkyrie he then punched in the face.”

Theo was grunting at that when Bonnie heard the sudden sounds of a struggle and a German-sounding woman that sounded vaguely like the one Björn had picked a fight with on the river shouted, “That Björn? You know that Björn? The Odinson?! Can you get me to him?”

“Probably not,” Bonnie said, grimacing. “Jessie told me he’s wandering the forest in Willow looking for an elf or something. Look, can you give the phone back to Theo, please? I have some…issues…come up and I could really use someone to talk to.”

“I don’t care about your meager problems, mortal—believe me, anything you could be going through would be miniscule in comparison to what is happening right now amongst the gods. It is important that I talk to the Odinson. He’s going to be instrumental in the days to come. You are but a flea on his ass in comparison, vampire queen.”

She sounds just like Björn, just slightly more girly, Bonnie thought. She considered how she had just spent half an hour in the bathroom digging dead Inquisitor out from under her nails. “Look, I can give you Björn’s number, but I’m not even sure he knows how to use a phone. He was too busy counting out gold and jewels and didn’t want to let me read him the manual. Besides, I got him the waterproof, smash-proof case, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t rated to barghest and he was kicking that Valkyrie’s ass.”

The woman on the other end snapped, “Are you always this flippant, you teat-sucking brat?!”

“My give-a-fuck factor is pretty low at the moment,” Bonnie admitted. “Jessie says I might still be in shock. He’s gonna do a diagnosis tonight after an interview, I guess. Listen, give Theo the phone back or I’m just gonna hang up.”

The woman on the other end started cursing and threatening her heritage, so Bonnie hung up. The phone rang a moment later and she debated letting it go to voicemail, then picked up on the fifth ring. “Are you gonna get here before I have to feed on some random stranger?” she asked. “Because I’m not feeling too good.”

“Look, Bonnie,” Theo said, sounding panicked, “get out of Anchorage. The Inquisitors will—”

“Pretty sure the Inquisitors are dead,” Bonnie said. “And Björn kicked that Fury’s ass, so maybe they’ll just leave us alone.”

“They’re not gonna leave you alone,” Theo babbled. “They’re neurotic about this. They’re gonna keep sending Inquisitors at you until—”

“Look, I’m more concerned about the feylords, to be honest,” Bonnie said. “Those arrows are like cemented in. Jessie said he had to use pliers and a blowtorch.”

Theo hesitated. “What feylords?”

“The ones who were going after Angus. They wanted to kill him. One of them’s his brother or something.”

Theo was silent for several moments before he said, “Bonnie, is Angus a feylord?”

“Yeah. A green one.” Bonnie yawned. “Look, I’m really tired. I got mauled by dogs and shot and shot again and then shot by a helicopter and then assaulted by a native dude then shrinked for an hour… I’m really not feeling my best, OK?”

“Angus is a feylord?”

“I told you that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?” Theo snarled. “That little fucker. No wonder I couldn’t find my keys. He was moving them!”

“Actually, he’s not little, he’s like six feet tall, and he was just telling you that you couldn’t find them,” Bonnie said tiredly. “He’s got a weird thing about compelling people. He can’t stop doing it. You, it was on purpose, though. It was payment for all the Star Wars and trying to make him sleep on the floor and eat low-grade dog food.”

“Why was a feylord—” Theo stopped. “Never mind. Just stay in Anchorage. I’m coming to you. Meet me out at the pull-off to Girdwood. I’ll let you know when I’m close.”

“I have an appointment with my therapist in a couple hours,” Bonnie said, oddly wanting to have that appointment. “I’ll meet you sometime after that.” She found she liked Jessie, despite the drain on her bank account, and she had some stuff she desperately needed to get off her chest.

On the other end, Theo sputtered. “…appointment…with a therapist?”

“Yeah, pretty sure he saved me from the feylords, but he won’t talk about it. Wanted to get into my feelings, and hey, gotta admit that’s kinda nice for once. Can you hurry up and get to Anchorage? I’m really starting to get twitchy about the no-feeding-since-Björn thing. Pretty sure I almost died, but Jessie won’t talk about that, either.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“I’m on my way,” Theo said. “Just stay inside, don’t go wandering anywhere. If you go outside, stay within ten feet of your vehicle…”

“Yeah okay.” Bonnie hung up, then glanced at the steering wheel of her pretty blue rented Subaru Forester, then over the dash at the road down Fifth Avenue. As usual, homeless—mostly natives kicked out of the Villages, but a few that looked like they could’ve been in Vietnam or Desert Storm—were shuffling down the road in the heart of Anchorage, panhandling on street corners or sitting on benches, waiting for the soup kitchens to open up.

Shannon was watching their blood-webs with longing when one homeless guy, in particular, caught her eye. He was wiry, blond, with startling blue eyes, and wearing what looked like a canvas used car SALE poster wrapped around him like a towel. When she realized that his flickering blue-black blood-web was not that of a human, however, she quickly put her key into the ignition.

Considering how crappy the rest of her week had gone with guys with similar blood-webs, she almost cranked the engine and left him there. Almost. Then she saw that the man was completely absorbed with some inner fight, and as she watched, his cerulean blue blood-web flickered back and forth, between splotchy, corrupted black to a deep ocean blue. When it was black, it looked almost like the Fury’s, except this one more or less matched his physical body perfectly, and when it was blue, it was the deepest, richest, most appetizing blue she’d ever seen.

A moment later, the blackness took hold inside him and the man stumbled into a wall, holding his chest and crying out in a sob. He was close enough to her car that when Bonnie rolled down her window, she could hear him whimpering, “Fight him…keep fighting…don’t give up your will, you can fight this…”

He’s blood-bound by Blóðvefr, Bonnie realized, frowning. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but something about the color of the man’s blood stirred some ancient memory that she couldn’t shake. How did he get bound by Blóðvefr? Freyja never let that thing out of her sight…

Again, Bonnie shook herself, not sure how she knew that. Her parents had made her worship Freyja since she was old enough to mime the prayers, but she was pretty sure they had never talked about a sacred athame that Freyja always wore in a scabbard on her hip.

One that, even now, Bonnie was getting a very vivid image of. She could even read the arcane inscriptions in a secret sorcerous form of Old Norse used only by Freyja and her völvur.

That’s…really weird… she thought, blinking and shaking her head as she tried to get the image of the dagger out of her mind.

But the image remained. Much, as she had discovered, like what her last therapist had called ‘intrusive thoughts’, most of which had been about naked people that—she now knew—her parents had been murdering while she had been growing up in the same house, the images spawned by PTSD from catching a glimpse of them here or there when she came home early or woke up unexpectedly in the middle of the night.

Except why would she be getting the same kind of vivid images about Freyja and her athame? Bonnie had certainly never met Freyja. Yet despite that, Bonnie could see the goddess standing over a fire, looking into the flames as she held the dagger in both hands, with her völvur standing all around her, watching solemnly. For some reason, the memory gave her extreme chills of wrongness, like it was alien and fake. She remembered herself walking away, mid-ceremony, to the startled calls of the völva standing around the fire.

But that couldn’t be right. Bonnie had never seen Freyja. After talking to Naeyen and Björn, both of whom were pretty adamant the goddess existed, Bonnie had stopped thinking her parents were full of crap, but the armored Viking statue of her that her parents had made her worship looked nothing like the beautiful, elegant woman she saw as ‘Freyja’ in her head.

The blond man’s whimpers came through the window of her car as he quickly shuffled away from two approaching pedestrians and ducked around a corner, leaning against the wall and gasping in clear, tearful panic.

I wonder if I can help him like I helped Angus, Bonnie thought, watching the man shiver and close his eyes, muttering to himself. His blood-web kept shifting, flickering back and forth. He was fighting some horrible inner battle, she realized. Whatever spell was holding him, much like Angus with Buðlungr, it was trying to take over his mind.

She could see the black energy lacing the poor man’s body, staining his back and—when she looked really close—his blood with void-black runes…

Then she noticed the way his head and half of his chest seemed…partially cleansed…of the dark energy, seeming to concentrate around some light blue energy staining his forehead and a deep, still-bleeding wound in his shoulder that even then glowed with sunlike energy.

Something already tried to counter the spell, she thought, again confused. She felt so bad for him, watching. Most people would only see a dangerous schizophrenic one step out of mental hospital, but Bonnie saw the inner torture, the agony going on behind the scenes, the terrified struggle against something deeper and darker than most people would ever know…

Bonnie again wondered if she could take him home and counter it with On the Use of Blood, like she’d done with Naeyen. She and Naeyen had left the book hidden in the woods along the road to the Deshka Landing in Willow while Björn was busy with his funeral, and it should be a simple thing to go back and retrieve it. Her instincts were saying the curse looked like a simple enough fix. All she had to do was get him to cooperate long enough to build another öndkar and yank the spell out…

“What is wrong with me?” Bonnie thought, shaking herself and blinking at the man. Ever since she’d woken up in Jessie’s office, she’d felt…different. More confident. Less fearful. More in control. Almost like the little stuff didn’t bother her anymore, and she almost wanted those Inquisitors track down her phone and try to take her back to some zealot’s dungeon for ‘cleansing’. She knew that if they ever tried it again, she’d blood-weave them into oblivion and make them dance like pixies if they even tried.

Then she caught herself. Blood-weave?

Again, Bonnie had to do a double-take. What the hell is wrong with me? she wondered, shaking herself. It was almost like almost dying had removed…something…that had been inhibiting her. She felt older, wiser, and ready to kick the ass of anyone who got in the way.

Maybe Jessie’s right and I’m in shock, she thought. She certainly didn’t have any reason to feel like more of a badass. She just…did. It was almost a hidden darkness within her, an awareness that she didn’t have before, a potential…

Maybe it’s psychosis, Bonnie thought. Her last therapist had been all about psychosis. Maybe she’d finally snapped under all the pressure—from finding the yatagarasu in the attic and realizing her parents were serial murderers to Theo trying to kidnap her and the barghest destroying her home and Angus mindweaving her and getting shot by Inquisitors and ambushed by vampires… Maybe she was on the same trajectory as the poor guy wrapped in the GREAT USED CARS sign and she was well on her way to ending up in the loony bin.

But she just felt more…connected…than she’d felt sitting on that gravel bank with Tl'oghk'etnaeyen. She didn’t know how, or why, but she was pretty sure that if those feylords attacked her again, she’d be able to make them regret it.

Really, really regret it… The satisfaction and promise in that deep inner thought made her hesitate. It was a comfortable feeling, a calm. It felt like her. Like a part of her she just hadn’t realized she was missing finally coming to the surface.

Bonnie struggled to remember what had happened to her in the final moments before she passed out. She remembered getting shot with arrows, remembered being attacked by big green dogs. She didn’t remember any magnificent epiphanies, no sudden miracles. If anything, she was pretty sure she’d died.

The longer she sat there in her air-conditioned Subaru, watching the struggling man babble and whimper, tensing and sobbing whenever a wave of the blackness tried to overwhelm the blue of his forehead and the gold of his chest, the more Bonnie felt the need to help him.

She knew what Theo and Masaaki would say. They’d tell her to stay the hell in the car. Better yet, fire it up and drive 10,000 miles away, and let the Anchorage Police Dept. deal with the babbling schizophrenic in the SALE sign.

But Bonnie no longer really gave a shit what Masaaki or Theo would tell her to do. She’d survived attempted assassinations four times now—or five or six, depending on how you wanted to count—and she didn’t really feel like keeping her head down and playing nice was getting her anywhere. Maybe being proactive would get her more in the long run.

It was the man falling onto his knees and begging Gaia for help, slamming his head repeatedly against a concrete wall as he cried and sweated and trembled, that finally tipped the scales towards helping him. Bonnie watched him struggle back to his feet, saw the blackness of the blood-binding overwhelm him again as he stumbled into an alley and out of sight. She could hear him sob and beg for Gaia to save him even as he slowly stumbled out of earshot.

Finally, against her better instincts, she yanked the key out of the ignition and got out of the car to follow him.