It pulled the spear right out of Erik’s hands, but he had his steel knife out in a flash. The claws crashed down on the wall again, with the beast snapping its sword-like fangs right at the lip of the wall, right at their boots. The men leapt back again, and attacked the arm again with harpoons and stones and hammers. The arm ripped away from the wall again, but a single hooked claw caught Freya’s foot and yanked her leg out from under her.
She fell down flat on the stone wall, but kicked hard two times, and her boot came free of the claw before it could drag her off the wall entirely. She rolled onto her stomach with her spear under her, and pushed herself back up.
Chapter 30. Silence
Erik felt naked. His borrowed shirt and trousers were too thin for the wind and the snow and the night air. The armored warriors and fishermen looked like iron gods beside him, heavy and solid, and most of all, warm. Erik was freezing. Even with his blood roaring and muscles burning, he was freezing.
Somewhere down below on the dark pebbled beach was his spear.
Gone. Useless.
The knife in his hand felt tiny and just as useless as he stared into the huge stinking maw of the beast below him. It was impossibly big. Twice as tall as a tall man, at least. And probably four times as heavy.
Is this what I turned into?
Did Wren see me like this?
Did Freya?
The monster pulled its arm back, yanking Freya’s foot out from under her. Erik darted forward, but she kicked free before he could take a second step, and she started to get back up. He held his knife at the ready, though every instinct in him was screaming to rip the harpoon away from the man next to him so he could do more than wait for something to stab with his little blade.
Freya stood up, her back to the beach.
The huge reaver shot its claws forward, not swinging them down onto the wall as before, but driving them straight on as a hunter drives a spear into a boar.
Freya!
He felt his lips and jaw moving, instinctively forming her name, screaming at her to run, to jump, to get down, and his free hand was waving, fingers signing as fast as he ever had signed in his life. But he made no screams and no one heard him. He beckoned madly with his hands, but she was looking at the old fisherman on her other side, and not at him.
The claws rushed forward.
Erik dashed across the wall, grabbed his wife with both hands, and spun her off toward the surprised fisherman.
The claws slammed into Erik’s back, four curving blades thrusting into his flesh, cracking his ribs, and snapping his spine. He felt his insides moving downward as his skin stretched and split. His arms snapped out to his sides all on their own, as though they hoped to reach back and take the claws out of his body, but just couldn’t reach. His legs kicked wildly, also beyond his control. The pain was everywhere, shrieking up and down his spine, and his jaw locked open as his neck strained to hold his head up.
He couldn’t think.
He couldn’t even feel.
He was the pain and the pain was him, and he stared up at the dark sky, at the thick clouds obscuring half the stars, at the tiny flakes of snow tumbling down toward him, and he didn’t understand what he saw.
As his head fell forward, he saw Freya. Her beautiful face, framed in white-golden hair and crowned with fox ears, her beautiful face turned toward him, her beautiful face red and white with rage and shock and sorrow. Her mouth was opening, her lips moving slowly.
Dimly, he knew she was screaming, but he couldn’t hear her.
He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t move his hands, and he couldn’t think of anything to say, and he couldn’t feel his…
Chapter 31. Fury
Freya spun into the arms of the fisherman and saw the reaver drive its claws into Erik’s back, saw her husband lifted off his feet, shaking and twisting with pain. She saw his face bright red as he screamed in silence. His chest expanded, wider and wider, until she saw the blood blossoming from the tears in his skin.
And then he was gone, ripped off the wall into the darkness and hurled back into the freezing waters of the bay.
“ NO! ” Freya ran across the wall and leapt into the cold, empty air with her spear raised in both hands, and she sank the steel blade and shaft deep into the reaver’s shoulder until it erupted through the beast’s back.
The reaver roared and stumbled.
Freya clung to the wet, bloody, stinking fur with one hand as she drew her serrated knife in the other hand and shoved it into the reaver’s neck. Heavy claws grabbed her legs, trying to yank her away, but she just tore deeper and deeper into the reaver’s throat. A vein burst and hot blood flooded out over her arm, and the reaver stumbled again, falling to its knees. The impact nearly shook her off, but Freya held tight, gasping for breath with her burning lungs and burning throat, barely able to see through her burning eyes drenched with hot tears.
The claws on her legs loosened and she shoved her knife deeper across the reaver’s throat, hacking and sawing at the monstrous windpipe and muscles and leathery flesh. The reaver leaned over and crashed onto the beach on its side and Freya slipped down to the ground, still clinging to her knife, which was stuck somewhere in the neck bones. Her arm was too tired and sore to cut anymore, so she let go of the knife and staggered back from the huge corpse. She fell on her backside, and sat there on the cold stones, weeping in silence.
He’s gone. Just… gone. I didn’t even… I should… he’s gone!
Slowly, she turned her head to look down the length of the dead reaver and she saw her spear, and then she saw four more harpoons all lodged down the belly and legs, and beside them were four gray-bearded fishermen in rusty, mismatched armor, gasping and wheezing and bleeding together on the beach beside her. One of them fell to his knees, his hand pressed to his chest, and two of his companions held him up and carried him through the door back inside the city. The last fisherman was the man who had stood at her side on the wall, and he shuffled over beside her and sat down in the snow.
After a few minutes, they both looked up to see a blinding white light bouncing along the top of the wall, and soon they could see Omar’s face as he ran toward them, sword in hand, and a moment later he was standing over them with a gathering crowd of men and women trickling out the seawall door to stare at the huge hairy body.
Back in the city there was cheering and shouting and laughing, and for a moment Freya couldn’t understand why anyone in the world could possibly feel any joy at that moment.
The old fisherman stood up, and Omar sat down in his place.
“We lost Erik?” he asked.
Freya nodded.
Omar stared blankly ahead, and then his face twisted in rage, and he leaned forward and plunged his bright sword into the body of the beast, and the fur and flesh instantly blackened, smoked, and burst into flame.
Chapter 32. Grief
Dimly, at the edges of her sight and hearing, Freya sensed the other people around them on the beach, some gawking at the corpse, some joking about the battle, others boasting and bragging. Gradually, they all moved back inside the wall, away from the stench of the burning reaver. But she stayed. And Omar stayed.
After an hour or so, when the fire had died down quite a bit and the drunken revelers of Rekavik were roaring merrily, Omar said, “My first wife died of old age. She was just forty-two, but that was quite old back then. I think I loved her, in a way. We were never close though. Two people in a house, was all. But we got along well, and there’s a kind of love that comes from just being together. Fixtures in each others’ lives. She died in her sleep, very peacefully, or so I was told. I wasn’t there. I was too busy forging my immortality. I regret that, a little. Even now. I can still remember her face, would you believe? But I’ve forgotten her name.”