Valknut: The Binding (39 page)

***

Junkyard lifted his head when he heard the
sirens. Someone would take Lennie away, soon. Maybe in a black SUV,
like Jim. And then he would…what? Go back to hunting the Hobo
Spider? The prospect filled him with emptiness.

Lennie’s fingers grew warmer between
Junkyard’s hands. He found that somehow comforting, as though he
could share some of his life with her. But then her hand grew too
warm. Hot. Her chest rose hesitantly. A gurgling came from her
throat, the sound almost lost in the hissing, clicking aftermath of
the wreck.

She was alive.

A thin stream of blood trickled from her
nose. Her mouth fell open and the stubborn crease between her eyes
deepened with pain. He gaped at her, unbelieving. But then he
remembered the night before, on the train, when that unexplained
puncture in her side had healed as he watched. Super healing powers
weren’t any weirder than the ability to spin thread from
fingers.

He squeezed her hand and gently laid it
across her stomach. Leaning close, he whispered, “I’m going for
help. Just hang in there.”

He climbed up the sloped floor and paused to
survey the wreckage. Their boxcar lay diagonally on the tracks,
propped against another boxcar, with the coupler from a third car
imbedded in its side.

Voices echoed up the line. Circles of light
danced over the cars as the crew checked the damages. Junkyard
yelled as loud as he could, “Hey, over here!”

No response. They must be too far away to
hear. Frustrated, he contemplated going after them, but he didn’t
want to leave Lennie. He was about to slide back down to check on
her when a man emerged from the shadow of the boxcar.

“Thank God! I thought no one heard me. My
friend is hurt and I’m afraid to move her.”

The man didn’t respond, or even move.
Junkyard eyed him uncertainly. He was big. As big as those beet
pickers who had nearly taken him apart the day he had met Jim, and
a lot more menacing. But Lennie needed help. “You got a cell
phone?”

The man lifted his head to look at Junkyard.
Yellow eyes flared from the shadowy face. The glow of a cigarette
appeared like a third eye.

Shivers rippled Junkyard’s skin. “Oh, crap.
Not another one.”

His instincts screamed at him to flee, but he
couldn’t leave Lennie. He pulled his knife, but held it, forgotten,
when the man smiled, revealing enormous, pointed teeth. Junkyard
couldn’t move. He could only stare into those piercing, yellow
eyes. This was something he couldn’t fight.

Jungle Jim’s voice seemed to call to
Junkyard. A warning. 
Look away
.

But a yellow haze pervaded Junkyards
thoughts, obscuring the hobo clown and all he represented. The
wild, unfocused rage he’d kept battened down so tightly sprang
free, seeking a target.

And the thing spoke. “Bring the girl to
me.”

Chapter 24

Fenrir smiled as Junkyard laid the
unconscious girl at his feet. Here was the last obstacle to his
chosen destiny. Sirens wailed from all directions, racing toward
the buckled train. They foreshadowed the days to come, when the
wails of human, Aesir, and Vanir alike would rise with every siren
in every city of the world.

It would begin tonight.

Free of interference, free of prophecy,
Fenrir would ride the backs of a million souls by morning. He
closed his eyes and felt along the threads that his mind held like
the reins of a thousand thousand war horses. Each thread restrained
one of his minions. Berserkers, poised to fire a weapon, start a
fire, collapse a power grid, cripple air traffic control, flood the
stock market, riot, lynch, terrorize, destroy, and in one glorious
moment, bring down the powers of the world. He lifted his face to
the sky.

“The world has never been so ready to die.
And it is I—Hrodvitnir—who will rise from the ashes.”

Though he did not shout, his words penetrated
the soil under his feet and the ground rumbled with their
power.

A bit melerdramatic, don’t ya think?

That voice!

A thousand thousand. Heck, I cain’t even
count that high. Careful yer horses don’t bolt all at once an’ tear
you to a thousand thousand pieces.

That nagging little gnat of a voice buzzed at
him, sucking the sweetness from his victories. Fenrir shook his
head as if to dislodge it from his ear. The inconsequential remains
of Angus Cook would not distract him, now. Not on the eve of his
greatest battle.

He would begin with the death of the girl.
She alone had the power to stop him.

Douglas Harding, the man she called Junkyard,
stood over her, unmoving but for the sporadic twitch of his hands.
Fenrir could feel the struggle within him, the burgeoning feelings
he begrudged himself, his desperate desire to save the girl, the
rage at the evil that had taken his brother’s life, his confusion
over the girl’s involvement.

So much emotion. So easy to twist, to bend to
one’s whim. Fenrir opened his connection to Harding’s mind and let
his will flow. Harding’s eyes began to glow.

Careful, now. The lad ran wild at the end of
yer tether, the last time.

“Silence!”

Perhaps the girl’s death would quell that
irritating voice. It pleased Fenrir to make Harding the instrument
of her destruction.

Yer slippin’, Fenrir. You couldn’t even
handle one muddle-headed hobo clown. He tricked ya—an’ him with a
broken brain.

Fenrir’s focus shattered and Harding’s eyes
faded to dull brown. Rage boiled under Fenrir’s skin, urging a
different shape, demanding that he tear into his tormentor and rend
human flesh from bone. The short hairs bristled and thickened over
this pale, weak body. Muscle and sinew strained as Fenrir’s true
form fought to be free of Angus Cook. But as he crouched, ready to
leap from the body, to turn and sink wolf teeth into its offending
heart, the reasoning part of his mind heard the laughter of Angus
Cook.

At once, his rage hardened into cold anger.
This human had nearly provoked him into destroying this form
prematurely.

“No,” he growled. “Soon, I will discard this
body and then you shall truly, most painfully die, but I will not
kill you now.”

Nor would he kill the girl. Again, he focused
on Douglas Harding. “Bring her.”

She would join her father in the lair of the
BRR. There, as the world began its irredeemable fall into chaos,
Fenrir would release this human form to its owner. Angus Cook would
live in freedom long enough to see the last of his line die before
him. That would be Fenrir’s parting gift to his host.

For once, the voice was silent.

***

Gentle waves lapped the lakeshore just inches
from Too Long Soo’s head, spraying her face with cool droplets. She
didn’t respond. Her body lay broken and bleeding at the bottom of a
rocky embankment. The sporadic sounds of nighttime highway traffic
drifted over the train tracks—rescue just a few dozen yards away.
She didn’t hear it. Her soul had fled to her deepest core, waiting
for the end.

A calm fell over the lake, rendering its dark
surface so flawless that the moon seemed to shine from its depths.
A loon’s call rose in mournful laughter, as if it had met fate and
thought it a bitter joke. Then silence. A moment of waiting.

A sigh stirred the opposite shore. A breath
sustained beyond human capacity. It found direction and blew,
cutting a wake in the lake’s smooth surface, shattering the
perfect, three-quarter moon.

The living air struck the body on the lake’s
shore and poured down into nostrils, flooding slack mouth, soaking
into skin. Sparks crackled in the straw-like hair. Fingers
stretched and splayed. Twisted limbs turned and straightened,
drawing life as a thirsty plant draws water. Bruises disappeared,
bones healed, bleeding stopped. At last the body lay still and
natural, as if sleeping on a bed of rocks.

The one who had become Too Long Soo sat up
and clutched her chest as if remembering pain. But there was
nothing wrong with this body.

“Fenrir, you silly pup. I tried to tell you
it wouldn’t work. Maybe I can be changed.

She examined herself. Moonlight highlighted
long, bony fingers and a down vest that had torn, spilling its
feathery guts. Patched jeans bagged around skinny legs that ended
in pointy-toed boots. She frowned. “Oh, dear. I definitely can be
changed.

“But I can’t be killed.”

The air shimmered beside her, solidifying
into a grungy canvas bag. “Ah, here we are. I believe I was
starting on bright orange.”

Rummaging inside, she pulled out a tangle of
beige twine and some twigs. She grunted in disgust. “Macramé. It
had to be macramé.”

Grumbling about pot hangers and owls with
button eyes, she tucked the bag under her arm and scrambled up the
embankment. Behind her, unnoticed, hung the mangled remains of a
guitar, entangled in the branches of a scrawny tree.

***

Lennie awoke with the side of her face
pressed to a gritty cement floor. The smells hit her first—pot,
cigarettes, stale beer. Then came memory of noise and chaos, as if
the world were shaking apart around her.

And there had been pain. Something had broken
in her chest, draining her life away. She should be dead by now.
The last thing she remembered was a tingling warmth spreading from
the triangles tattooed on her hand.

Well, at least she’d gotten one good thing
out of that tattoo.

But where was she? Boxcars didn’t have cement
floors. She wasn’t eager to try moving just yet, but she had to
see. She cracked her eyes open. Junkyard sat cross-legged before
her, under a familiar bare bulb hanging from an orange cord. She
was in the warehouse from her dream.

And Junkyard’s eyes glowed yellow.

“She’s awake,” he said.

Shoes scraped the floor. A dead animal stench
wafted over her, overwhelming the others. Lennie’s stomach heaved
and she swallowed hard. She knew who was there without looking.

“Good,” said a deep, coarse voice. “Then we
can begin.”

The words sent a chill through her that
threatened to freeze her to the floor. Gotta get out of here. She
rolled to her feet and tried to run, but Junkyard rose and tackled
her down. She tried to push him off and wriggle free, but he pinned
her easily.

“No, let me go!”

“I think not.” Junkyard’s voice, but Fenrir’s
words.

Knife in hand, Junkyard leaned so close that
his hair tickled her cheek. An inhuman hatred distorted his
features. Hatred so deep that she might not have recognized him but
for the long sideburns and the hard angles of his face. His yellow
eyes bored into her, unwavering. She refused to meet them. They had
become a conduit to Fenrir’s mind.

Her skin twitched as the knife drifted toward
her. “Junkyard, he’s using you. You’ve got to fight him—”

The knife came at her face. Its tip trailed
down her cheek as lightly as a lover’s touch. A stinging wetness
followed its trail. The blade stopped at her throat. Lennie
swallowed against its sharp edge. Keeping her eyes averted from
Junkyard’s face, she flexed her tattooed hand. It burned with all
the voltage of a penlight. She doubted there was enough power to
net a mouse.

The pressure on the blade increased. Lennie’s
lips parted. She wanted to scream, but the breath caught in her
throat. Then a shadow fell over them both.

“Restrain yourself, Douglas. I am not
finished with her, yet.”

Shadow oozed over Lennie as if it had
physical substance. Shudders wracked her body. She had felt that
darkness before—in the parking lot—at the carnival—but not so
powerful, so invasive as this. The tendrils of Fenrir’s will
prodded her mind for weakness, seeking passage like great,
poisonous worms. She fought them, gasping with effort, and kept her
gaze locked on Junkyard’s chin, on the short whiskers that had
sprouted since morning—on the cleft that she hadn’t noticed until
now. Junkyard could play with his knife all he wanted, as long as
he stayed between her and Fenrir. But Junkyard released her and
stepped back into the shadow.

And Fenrir was there.

Her great-great-whatever grandfather,
cigarette and all. Only he wasn’t her grandfather. The body was an
inadequate mask, too puny to disguise the monstrous evil it
contained. Broad-shouldered and enormous, he sat on a battered,
over-stuffed chair, holding a staff like a scepter in his hand. The
throne of the hobo king. She would have laughed if he weren’t so
terrifying.

The weight of Fenrir’s power fell full upon
her with crushing force. Her hand responded, a hornets’ nest
against an avalanche, barely enough to keep her mind free.

“Do you know,” Fenrir said, his voice a low
growl, “how long I have waited for this moment?”

Don’t look at his eyes. She forced her gaze
to Fenrir’s shoes, making herself note their high-polished
blackness. Against her will, her gaze trailed up his legs, pausing
at the rough-carved staff in his hands—the one from Verdandi’s
vision?

She wasn’t allowed to study it. Irresistibly,
her eyes traveled upward, along the starched whiteness of his
shirt, to his hard, cruel mouth. He plucked the cigarette from
thick lips and exhaled. Smoke swirled around him, twining into the
shadow. He smiled, unveiling pointed animal teeth. Lennie
shuddered. I will 
not 
meet his eyes.

“For millennia, I waited underground,
listening and planning. For a century, I gathered my legions. And
now, this night, they will fall like an ax upon the neck of the
world. There is only you—” contempt hung from his words, “—to stand
in my way.”

He snapped his fingers and signaled. “Bring
her to me.”

There was a note of finality in his
voice.

Junkyard stayed beside Fenrir’s throne like a
guard. When he didn’t move, Lennie felt a brief hope that maybe he
was fighting Fenrir. Maybe she wasn’t alone against the monster.
Then strong hands grabbed her from behind and bent her arm back
until her tattooed hand touched her shoulder blades. She cried out,
tried to twist away, and managed to stomp hard on her captor’s
foot. He swore and his grip loosened, but before she could escape,
a wiry arm snaked around her neck. A voice grunted in her ear.
“Hold still, 
güerita
, or I will break your arm like a
twig.”