Page 47
She snorts that typical Asha laugh, but it sounds very much not happy. ‟You always were a smart puppy. I hate you had to be dragged into this thing,” she says. ‟I was planning it for months, you know? Looked at all potential Hunters to bring with me, all eventualities, everything. I thought you were the right person for the job. A newbie, a greenhorn, someone who wouldn’t notice what I was doing. And if you’d just kept your distance from the monsters, like you were supposed to…” With a deep sigh, she taps the base of my skull and murmurs, ‟go right here, over the bridge, then right again. It’s not far now.”
The Darkcity district harbor sprawls along the Bracket River banks across from us, sparkling in the settling darkness. From this side of the river, it looks almost modern, alive. If you are at the foot of those chimneys, it looks like a crumbling tomb. Her route will put us right in the middle of it. I suddenly know where we’re going. I have been there not even a day ago. And it doesn’t bode well for me or Cor at all. ‟Wait a minute. Why are you taking me to the Norseman?”
The atmosphere in the car sags down to arctic levels, and for a moment in time, a tiny slice of it, I think Asha is about to shoot me, and damn the consequences. I don’t dare look into the mirror again; I just grasp the steering wheel harder and pray to all the gods to keep me safe. A long, tense moment later she takes a deep breath, and the muzzle relaxes a little against my head. It doesn’t disappear, though. Shame. ‟I should have known you’d stumble over him. You have been way too busy for my tastes, Gideon,” she drawls.
No ‘puppy’, or ‘grasshopper’, or ‘pumpkin’ anymore, just my name. I feel like I graduated into a rank that I am not sure I want to have at this moment. If she takes me seriously now, of all situations, my chances of escaping are zero. I don’t reply to her words, and she doesn’t seem to expect me to. Instead, we both fall silent as I navigate the roads into the worst district Babylon City offers.
Last time I didn’t drive into the harbor area, mostly because Stanley told me it would be like wrapping my lease car in a nice red ribbon and giving it away to whoever came by first. Asha doesn’t give a shit about my insurance record, though. She makes me drive all the way, right up to the front door of the factory where I met the vampire guard earlier.
At this time in the night, there are way more vampires milling around, staring at us with a mixture of disinterest and dislike as I turn off the motor. They look like carbon copies of the goons that went after Cor when I first met him; big, burly, pale, vaguely resembling Norse gods, and all of them so old I can feel it in my bones. Until now, I didn’t even know I could feel vampires like this, not to speak of getting a notion of their age by just being close-by.
Looking over at Asha, I am not sure I should be able to feel them. No Hunter has ever been able to, or at least I have found no mention of that in any of our accounts and archival documents.
‟Turn off the motor and put your gun on the passenger seat,” Asha orders, opening her safety belt.
I do as I’m told and carefully slide out of the car when she removes the gun from my head and gets out herself. The five or six vikingy vampires on guard duty around the area watch on quietly, unmoving until Asha marches me towards the big metal front door, hands raised. Then two of them block the way to the main factory, while two more maneuver themselves between us and the car.
‟No entry,” one guard says, his accent heavy and very obviously Russian.
Asha pokes her head out from behind me, keeping a healthy four-foot distance, so I can’t grab her gun as she turns her attention to the vampires. ‟I’m here to bring your rabid dog back to your master. I think he’ll want to meet with me.”
The guard dubiously looks from her to me and my raised hands. ‟And your Hunter friend plays a part in this somehow?” He must recognize me, because otherwise he wouldn’t give a damn about some prisoner. But a Hunter prisoner? That is much more worrisome.
‟A very important part, yes. But I am not here to negotiate with you. I am here to meet the boss,” Asha says with all the fake calm in the world. I wonder if the vampires can hear the low-grade tension in her words as well as I can. It’s her ‘I’m ready to shoot someone’ voice, but this time, it doesn’t seem to be directed at me. For once, I am not sure if Asha would win if it came to a fight, though. I almost want the guards to test her posturing. Almost.
The vampire steps to the side and back towards the door, pulls out a phone and starts a quiet conversation, while the other one moves his attention to me and takes me in with flicking eyes. I get the feeling that he wants to say something, or ask something, but decides against it at the last second. His behavior makes me want to say something in turn, but Asha takes a half-step closer to bonk me over the head with the muzzle and hisses, ‟you shut up.” Ow.
The guard raises one brow minutely, but again doesn’t comment. Instead, he turns his head to look back at his colleague on the phone, who turns the phone away just enough to give him a curt nod before going back to whispering. Looking back at us, he steps out of the way and lifts his chin towards the door. ‟In you go. Sören will go with you. Make sure you don’t get… lost.”
‟Great,” Asha grumbles and gives me a mild shove against the center of my back to get me going. As she marches me past the guard, I give him the side-eye, trying to telepathically warn him. Of what, I don’t know myself. Something bad will happen; that much I am sure about. And it will involve cultists, and Cor’s tormentors, and most likely awesome amounts of dead people.
The vampire’s eyes follow me until the big metal gate falls shut again with a tinny clang, unmoving. One vampire with a white blond, weirdly modern mullet haircut follows us inside, machine gun routinely tucked into the crook of his arm, and nods up the wide metal stairs in the center of the room. ‟Up, left, along the hallway, last door on the right,” he instructs, and we walk, him taking up the rear.
It’s not the same route I had to take when I was here the last time, which means the Norseman is not letting Asha into his throne room. A most likely irrelevant detail, considering everything else, but I do take notice. I can only hope that these vampires know a trap when they see one. Unfortunately, if Asha dangles Cor in front of Ove Egil’s nose, he just might ignore even the most blatant setup.
We reach the end of the hallway with no incidents, and Sören opens the door for us with a flourish that would be more fitting in a theater than in this dingy factory compound. But I don’t have time to dwell on his theatricality because as soon as we enter the room, my eyes land on the Norseman.
He’s standing beside an empty metal chair, head hung low and hair obscuring his face. His leather and chain armor looks even heavier and more impressive than last time, but the big double-headed war axe is missing. In its stead, he has a short, wide gladius strapped to his hip, and what looks like a Beretta in a front-draw shoulder holster. I wouldn’t have expected him to use guns, but the sight is weirdly reassuring. If he is careful enough to use modern warfare, Asha might have bitten off more than she can chew.
For now, the chair seems to be the most important thing to him as he reaches out and lovingly places a hand on the backrest. It is bolted to the floor, thick, sturdy metal, with rings and bolts for what I assume are shackles and ropes to keep whoever is about to be under Egil’s tender mercies in place. Still, having us there doesn’t feel like a threat to us, more like we are crashing a very personal moment. I can vaguely see his profile through the thick curtain of hair, but can’t quite make out his expression. It looks like he might be praying, but do vampires hang on to religion?
The Norseman might.
Meeting him again makes the hair on my arms stand upright, even though he hasn’t yet turned his attention on me. I know what it feels like to be peeled apart by his eyes, and I’m not looking forward to it. Asha seems unaffected by his presence, but maybe it’s because she doesn’t see him, his power, his age, as clearly as I can. She halts beside me, her gun twitching slightly towards him before she checks herself and points it at the center of my back again.
‟What is this?” she asks through clenched teeth.
If I were in her shoes, I would also assume this was a threat, but I find myself quietly praying for her to hold her snark in check for once. I’d rather not be murdered today because an insulted antediluvian demon hunter vampire thinks I’m friends with a rude broad.
The Norseman slowly looks up and turns his head until his eyes find hers. He skips me completely, as if my raised hands somehow make me invisible. “Hunter,” he says with that deep, rumbling voice of his as his piercing blue eyes slice through what little he can see of her. It doesn’t sound like a compliment or a complaint, more… mocking. Vampires have this creepy talent of putting entire stories into single words, and this one says clearly: You are hiding behind an unarmed man, what do you expect me to think?
Asha takes a step forward and to the side, still pointing the gun at me but not using me as a human shield anymore. “Greetings, Norseman. I have come to strike a bargain with you,” she says, surprisingly solemn.
This time, his eyes swipe over my body, face unmoved. I know he recognized me, but nothing about how he checks me out betrays it. For a moment, I hope he might play her to protect me, but then he turns to Sören and nods toward me. The guard shoulders his machine gun and grabs my arms, handcuffing them behind my back before Asha can protest. He drags me to the side a little and pushes on my shoulder impatiently.
I drop to my knees before Sören gets the idea to kick my legs out from under me; no need to risk additional injuries right now, I’m hurt enough already. My vampire guard grunts placated and loosely points his automatic at me, as if to remind me not to get too comfortable. As if I ever would.
With me stowed away safely, Asha holsters her gun and takes measure of Egil. Her face remains calm, but I know her enough to see the hard tug around her jaw. He’s impressing her, and she doesn’t like it one bit. This isn’t one of the usual Hunter negotiations where our kind has the power, and they both know it. Hell, everyone present knows it.
