CHAPTER 43: ROAD TRIP

Björn sat as far into the back of the limo as he could get, trying to decide which god he’d pissed off in a prior life. Loki, obviously. But, now that he thought about it, maybe he had somehow scorned Freyja in passing, and now the Goddess of Love was happily drinking mead, petting her boar, and overseeing skirmishes on her gloriously bloody field of Fólkvangr, taking time out of her busy schedule to laugh at his expense while he followed this Firstlander woman around like a lapdog. The name Mardöll was, after all, one of Freyja’s many aliases, when traveling amongst mortals. Perhaps the goddess was showing preference merely upon the fondness for his gift’s soul-name.

“You’re quiet back there,” Shannon said, looking at him through the rear-view with her sunglasses and heavy scarfs obscuring her face.

“I’m figuring out which gods hate me and why.”

“Why do you think a god hates you?” the vampire asked.

Björn made a disgusted sound and gestured at his current state of affairs. She’d dressed him in a pair of stiff overall jeans she called Carhartts, forced him to don a blindingly bright spiral tie-dye shirt—matched his tiger stripes, she insisted—stuffed his feet into a pair of much-too-small hiking boots, and wrapped his hair in a frilly, fluffy blue hairband.

“If you’re still complaining about the pants, Carhartts are pretty ubiquitous. Everybody wears ‘em. You don’t look funny. It’s an Alaskan thing. They’re functional. Guys do pretty rough stuff up here and they’re about the only things that hold together. Just give them some time—they’ll grow on you.” She paused and looked at him again from the road. “But if it’s the hairband, just suck it the hell up, okay? It’s all they had.”

“Then let me wear my hair down,” Björn snapped.

“It’ll get tangled again,” she said stubbornly. “I had to comb it for hours to get the tangles out.”

Leave it to a woman to worry about stupid things, like clothes and tangles in one’s mane. “It’s unmanning.”

He could see her roll her eyes behind the sunglasses. “You like that word, don’t you?” Before he could answer, she continued, “No it’s not. As big and badass-looking as you are, it’s a fashion statement. Nobody’s gonna think you’re a girl. Believe me.” Then she cocked her head at him. “Hey…you ever considered getting your ears pierced?”

Doomed to play a dress-up doll to a soft female First-Lander. Just kill him now. At least she had had the decency to give him a bottle of acetone and a box of Q-Tips to remove the nail polish. “I said I wouldn’t touch you,” Björn growled. “I never said I would let you dress me.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the one insisting on coming along. Hey, I’m gonna have to stop for gas here, soon. This thing’s a gas-hog. You up for a couple cheeseburgers or something?”

Björn grimaced. “Can’t we just rent a room at an inn for the day?” He still felt uncomfortable traveling during the day. Too many things could go wrong. If his enemies caught him in the daylight…

“We’re on the freakin’ Seward Highway in Podunk, Alaska!” she cried. “I swear to God, if you say one more thing about your enemies catching you in broad daylight, I’m gonna dress you in pink next time. You’d look good in pink. Like Barbie. Same color hair.” She sighed. “But you probably don’t even know what Barbie is, so the threat was a slash-fail.”

Björn narrowed his eyes. “I know what Barbie is.”

She peered at him through the small window between their compartments once more, obviously curious. “Oh yeah? How?”

“The vampire lord who summoned me to the First Realm had me babysit his small, annoying child for the first ten years of my contract.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Babysit?” She did not try to hide her surprise. “No offense, dude, but you don’t really strike me as the babysitting type.”

“When you are bound by a geas of seiðr, you are whatever the bearer of your contract wishes you to be.”

“Contract?”

Björn grimaced. The last thing he wanted to do was give a vampire queen—who had all the natural tools necessary for the blood-rites—ideas about summoning Third Landers to serve her. “It’s nothing.”

“That’s how you got here? Someone paid you to bodyguard their kid?”

Björn met her gaze through the mirror and considered.

“So you’re from what, Germany?” she insisted.

“I’m from the Third Realm,” Björn said.

“Is that the place where it’s always night?”

“It is.”

“How’d you get here?” she asked.

Dressed in an eye-searing cacophony of color, sitting in the back of a moving vehicle with the only thing standing between him and the full power of the sun being a darkened sheet of glass, Björn didn’t especially feel like talking. But, realizing she would keep poking at it like a curious rodent if he tried to withhold it from her, he just sighed and said, “I was summoned from my homeland in a blood rite, in which I was trapped inside a four-foot pentacle and forced to choose between signing over my service to a vampire lord for twenty years or remaining in that circle for eternity.”

“How’d you get with the slavers? He sold you?”

Björn snorted. “I killed the lord, when my time was up, then wandered across the country looking for the bastard Odin wants me to kill, eating vampires and other minor irritants in my spare time. They drugged me in a bar in New Jersey, then shipped me across the continent in a special-built vault to some collector in San Diego, whose wife sold me to the Five Realms Trading Company, when I made her a widow.”

Her mouth formed a little O. “So…uh…he brought you here with magic?”

“A working of seiðr that yanked me from my realm when the veil was weakest. You would probably call it a demon-summoning.”

There was a very long silence from the front of the car. Then, “Oh.” Her eyes flickered to him again from behind the dark sunglasses. He could smell her sudden pang of fear.

Sighing, Björn said, “Before you ask, according to the beliefs of your weak and spineless Realm, yes. And, in my realm, First Landers are considered food, those that are stupid enough to try to cross the veil.”

“Oh.” She swallowed. “Well, that’s starting to make a bit more sense.”

“What is?”

“You being all creepy and shouty and breaking things.”

Björn narrowed his eyes at her. “You weren’t cooperating.”

“You were biting me and talking about my juices!”

“That’s a perfectly natural part of any female body’s response to something that thoroughly arouses her.” He smiled at her through the rearview. “And believe me. You were thoroughly aroused.”

He couldn’t tell if she reddened, swathed in as much clothing as she was, but he heard her heartbeat speed up.

Björn leaned forward, until he was looking at the back of her neck through the compartment window. Softly, in her ear, he said, “I’m going to enjoy our first time together, vampire. I’ve had women before, but never a soulmate. I’ve heard it heightens the experience a hundredfold.”

“Oh, gee, look, a gas station.” She gave that nervous titter. “Guess this is a good place to stop. Gotta go out in the sun now, sorry!” Without another word, she swerved the limo off the highway in a maneuver that almost collided them with an oncoming pickup. “Cheeseburgers?” she asked, as she was hastily unbuckling and getting out.

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Björn frowned. “I’m not—”

She slammed the door behind her, cutting him off. As he watched through the near-black glass, she jogged off towards the little diner, leaving him alone in the parking-lot. A group of kids paused to gawk at the limo as they passed, headed for the restaurant. One of them stopped to take a picture.

Björn sighed and looked at the dog through the compartment window. “Do you understand what’s wrong with her?”

The dog, which had been panting, mouth open, happily staring out the window at the sunny parking-lot, closed its mouth and started to growl at him.

Björn narrowed his eyes and peeled his own lips back in a snarl. “Bet you’d taste nice.”

The dog snorted and turned back to watching the parking-lot. In a moment, he was panting again, leaving long rivulets of drool on the dash.

“You’re disgusting,” Björn said.

The dog farted. Chili. Because the soft-hearted First Lander idiot had insisted on feeding it a massive bowl of chili when they’d stopped at Costco to load up on vast coolers of disgusting, cold, plastic-packaged meat for Björn. His insistence that he needed to hunt for his meals had gone completely ignored, and now he was packed into the back of the limo with four big blue-and-white coolers of cold, dead meat that didn’t even have the slightest tinge of blood. Ugh. Only the dog seemed to be happy with the whole arrangement, for he let off another long, silent emission from beneath his pampered ass.

“We have to breathe this air, you know,” Björn snapped. “And I can’t roll down a window. Put a cork in it, beast, or I’ll do it for you.”

The massive dog yawned and started licking its slobber off the dash. He let off another long, low whisper of flatulence.

Björn shuddered. She had specifically forbade him from killing the beast, and had even gone so far as to specify the acts of mutilation, maiming, and unmanning that would happen if he did. Björn could still do it, but it would require much more effort to do battle with the remnants of the Nótt Danzleikr than he wanted to expend. That bothered him. It had never occurred to him what would happen if he never killed the queen that had poisoned him. So many times, as soon as he had defeated the Nótt Danzleikr, he had simply killed the queen and ended his problems. He had never considered that there might be lasting consequences if he never killed the queen. He held up his hand and peered at it. The silver still threaded his veins, if one looked closely, though it seemed almost dormant.

Damn it. Was he doomed to that heady, brainless bliss every time she fed upon him? He would have to rip out her venom glands. Yeah, that was it.

But, even as he had the thought, Björn felt a pang of desire, a need to feel that ecstasy coursing through his body once more. Odin’s bones. Björn dropped his head into his palms and rubbed his temples. He was the Dröttning Banamaðr. The Queen Slayer. Champion of Odin. He did not desire to be dosed with that mind-killing poison of a queen once more.

Yet, alarmingly, he did. Badly.

Björn returned his attention to the café, wondering how long Shannon was going to waste his time on this goose chase before submitting to him. He would have to kill Masaaki, clearly. And Theo, too. It was obvious to Björn that they were too close to his mate, and therefore needed to be removed from the equation before she would come to terms with her new position. Theo, at least, he would be able to digest. Vampire lords actually tasted rather spicy, probably due to all the magic in their blood. Masaaki, he would probably have to bury in the backyard. The taste of vegetarians disgusted him. Too…bland.

“You’re on the top of the list,” Björn told the dog. “Probably tonight, as soon as I can get out of this damned car.” He hated being in cars. He hated being cooped up. It reminded him too much of that damned vault. Now, crammed into the back of a limo, sharing space with four coolers and a malodorous dog, he was beyond twitchy. He just wanted to throttle something. “I’m talking to you,” he growled.

Now the flatulent dog was simply ignoring him, watching intently as four people dressed from head-to-toe in black entered the front of the café.

To distract himself, Björn threw open the closest cooler and pulled out a big multi-pack of steaks. Peeling off the cellophane, he brought the beef to his nose and sniffed. Like everything else about this soft, pathetic realm, there wasn’t even an ounce of adrenaline in the meat. It didn’t even have to fight for its life, he thought, disgusted.

Grimacing, Björn yanked a steak from the top and bit into it, severing a piece of cold, moist flesh and chewing on it. “You want some of this?” he asked, holding it up to the window and waving it back and forth.

The dog tore its eyes away from the front of the café and his drool output increased. He barked, a single, deep woof, and it just about burst Björn’s eardrums.

“Odin’s balls. Here.” Björn tossed the steak through the compartment window. It landed on the dash and started sliding down towards the floor. The mastiff confiscated it and stretched out between driver and passenger seats, paws squishing the raw meat into the driver’s seat as it began tearing the refrigerated flesh apart.

Björn plucked another steak from the package, feeling depressed. This was what life had come to. Following the soul gifted to him by Odin around like a lost puppy, wearing human clothes, eating cold, dead meat. He sighed and bit into a new piece of steak. At least it wasn’t cooked. He hated cooked meat. If ever there was a useless waste of energy ever invented, it was the cooking of meat. What was the point in that?

And she wanted him to eat cheeseburgers. Peh. He bit off another hunk of steak, rolling the cold flesh around on his tongue. No blood to wet his mouth. Just…meat. Disgusted, he threw the hunk through the window and watched the dog scramble for it.

Maybe pork would be better. He emptied the package of steak through the window, juices and all, then dumped the remaining packaging back in the cooler from whence it had come and went hunting for pork. Pig, unlike a cow, was omnivorous. Therefore, it had a thousand times more flavor.

But when Björn opened the coolers, he found no pork. Just piles upon piles of beef. Then he remembered what Shannon had said as she settled back into the limo and his eyes narrowed. “I really didn’t want to get you pork because people get worms and trichinosis from raw pork.” He had assumed, of course, that meant she had gotten it, but had simply had reservations about it. After all, he had told her to get it, and he was her lord. Odin’s gift to him because she was dying anyway.

But she’d disobeyed him. Again.

Björn listened as the mastiff downed the steaks on the other side of the window, then was somewhat surprised as it balanced on the driver’s seat and lifted its head to the window to look in at him. “Well,” Björn said to the dog, “I take it you like me now.”

The dog licked its lips and whined. Björn snorted. “I could break your neck and tell her you fell.” Immediately, that rush of static from the Nótt Danzleikr almost threw him into another wash of bliss, but he fought it down. It would be an easy thing to break the dog’s neck, but instead, Björn found himself fascinated. He’d never managed to get this close to a dog before, and had to admit he was a bit curious what all the hubbub was about. The whole Man’s Best Friend thing confused him.

He reached into the cooler and grabbed another package of steaks. “Still hungry?” he asked.

The dog whined again and licked its lips.

Grunting, Björn tore the plastic away and held up a steak. “Bite me and I’ll twist off your head by your eye-sockets,” Björn warned, holding it out.

The mastiff took the steak gently and retreated back into the front of the limo. Björn leaned forward to watch it munch the cold, lifeless meat down like it was a fabulous treat. He slapped another one down on the seat when he was finished, then watched as the dog struggled through that one, too. It was definitely slowing down, and didn’t completely finish the third one he put in front of it.

“You got a seven-steak limit, then?” Björn asked.

The dog sat up again and whined, putting a paw up on the driver’s-side door, looking over its shoulder at Björn. Two of the black-garbed humans were exiting the front of the diner. They gestured at a dark SUV and started walking around the back of the café. Four more black-clad men got out of the vehicle and started jogging after them.

Now that was a color he wouldn’t mind wearing. Black. Not the disgusting starburst currently profaning his chest. At least some of the humans around here had good taste.

The dog jumped from the window and stuck its head back through the compartment opening and barked again.

Björn winced at the pressure on his eardrums. “Finish that one on the seat and you can have another,” Björn said, gesturing. He didn’t really care if the dog wasted meat, but he would rather his little vampire queen didn’t discover he’d fed it a package and a half of her precious New York steak. He didn’t want to add pink hair and a tutu to his fashion statements.

The dog yanked its heavily-jowled head back through the divider and started clawing up the leather of the door, whining.

Björn rolled his eyes and tossed the meat back into the cooler. Man’s Best Friend, indeed. “Don’t ask again. I am Nökkvi. I don’t caper to the whims of an idiot beast.”

The dog barked again, this time at the diner. At least most of the reverberation was stopped by the divider. Wincing, Björn slid the compartment window shut. Let the stupid beast bark itself dumb.

The dog started barking in earnest, now, and the whole limo started rocking with the violence of its pacing back and forth on the seats.

Then something else occurred to Björn. Sudden, unexpected meals tended to kick-start one’s bowels. Even a barghest could be affected by it if, say, he happened to kill a mammoth. Even Björn had been guilty of over-indulging, the two times he’d downed the pale, hairy beasts.

Björn slid the compartment window open to glare at the dog. “Let me guess,” he muttered. “Some rube just gave you a gigantic meal and now you need to take a gigantic shit.”

The dog started barking and clawing at the glass. There was definite desperation in its face.

“Oh, fuck this,” Björn said. He was not going to sit in an enclosed space with the smell of shit. He had a very sensitive nose. “Get your ass back. Back!” He reached through, grabbed the mastiff by the scruff of its neck, and easily dragged it away from the door. Then he leaned over and pulled the latch on the driver’s side door. “Go have fun. Highway’s over there. I’m sure there’s plenty of roadkill.” Even if it didn’t get hit by a car, maybe it would go get lost or something. One less annoyance to deal with.

The mastiff surged from the door before he’d had it completely open, yanking it out of his hands and throwing it against its hinges, and Björn actually had to reach partially into the sun to retrieve it. Growling, he slammed the door behind it and started nursing his burns. Man’s Best Friend had just made itself dinner. Dogs were omnivores, too.