Sam ignored her ridicule of him and explained what had happened. The things he mentioned were so sincere and the words he chose to describe the dark hold it had on him, down to the odor of the substance, struck Nina as too accurately fantastical to be fabricated. Sam was the most cynical man she knew, his points of view were always rooted strictly in reality and he never paid mind to fanciful notions or resorted to supernatural excuses when he lacked the rationalization of incidents. It had to be real, she thought. He looked spooked even while telling her about it.
“Do you even know anything about that thing? What did she say when she gave it to you?” he asked, as she poured the water into the two big mugs she had selected for them.
“She said it was a gift. But you know, tonight she flipped when she heard I left it with you,” Nina said as she pondered on the way Val reacted. “Hey!” she exclaimed suddenly, “I think I know where we can look up what it is!”
Nina took Sam up to the tower room, where he exhibited pretty close to her own reaction when she first beheld the interior of the heathen room. Immediately, Nina opened the huge old book. Sam stared at the pages as if he knew they were not made of paper. Her fingers trailed the slightly thick pages and she started her search from the middle of the book, while she explained the purpose of The Brotherhood to him.
“All women?”
“Yes.” Nina could not help but smile, her eyes glinting with amusement.
“The Brotherhood,” he blinked, trying to make sense of it.
“Isn’t it fascinating? Don’t you see how smart that is, Sam? Their enemies, and everyone who knows them by reputation, look for men. It is the perfect disguise,” Nina beamed. For some reason, she found this beyond captivating. Sam smiled and shook his head as she flipped through the book. A few pages before the back of the book, they found it: ‘The Vision of Kvasir’
“Aye! There you are, you bastard!” Sam cried out when he recognized the devilish flask on the sketch. He pounded his fist on the table next to the book as if he had won a bet.
“Sam! Be careful!” she warned. “You don’t know how strong the wood of this table is! Now, let’s see what is in the flask she gave me. And why she would have given to me in the first place.”
In the small sections of English and German text they could find among those in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Norse, they put together the information on the contents of the vial, gathering the necessary knowledge that Lita had also obtained from the writings on her scroll.
“Unbelievable,” Sam gasped as Nina pieced together the German parts for him. “This is next level alchemy. How the hell did they know this stuff back then?”
“One thing I have learned from studying the past is that nothing has really changed in the way of mind capacity. As a matter of fact, I believe that our discoveries during the 19th Century and all the technological development since had made us lazy. To tell you the truth, these ancient civilizations were as smart as, if not smarter than, us. We have machines thinking for us,” she said as she looked over the recipe and the compounds, sipping her tea. She shook her head slowly in awe, “These people could fuck us up on every level if they had to wage war on us today. Actually, that is what this Lita chick is apparently trying to do — use this kind of knowledge to undermine and override our methods and hit us with weapons we cannot combat simply because we don’t know how they work.”
“Can’t fight what you can’t see,” Sam muttered as his eyes passed over the sketches in the book.
“Precisely,” Nina agreed. “People fear what they don’t know for a very good reason.”
Sam’s ring tone sounded. It was Peter at The Post.
“Cleave, I checked out that couple you asked me to spy on,” Peter said jovially.
“And?” Sam asked, although, since his inquiry he had no more reason to investigate Val and her husband.
“They don’t exist.” Peter chuckled. “If you met them in person, I suggest you run like hell, because they might just be skin-walkers!”
“What do you mean, they don’t exist?” he asked, pretending not to notice Nina’s questioning look.
“There is just no record of these specific names, no marriage certificate, no vehicle registrations, no criminal offences. Nothing. Are you sure you have the right names?” Peter asked.
Sam gave a long sigh and rubbed his brow, “Alright, Peter, that’s okay then. I was just curious. Thanks so much for all your trouble, though. Appreciate it.”
“No sweat, Cleave. If you need anything else, don’t hesitate and all that, righty?” Peter said in his cheerful way.
“Will do.”
From a distance, they could hear the rumble of motorcycles. Like a swarm of mechanical bees they grew louder and louder in their approach.
“They’re back,” Nina exclaimed and she went to the window to see the white lights float through the night like ghostly lamps drifting on a black river.
As she opened the door downstairs, she could immediately tell that something had gone terribly wrong for her new friends. From the dark, she could hear Gunnar scream, “Open the door wider! Get out of the way!”
He appeared from the cloak of darkness outside, carrying Val’s limp body in his powerful tattooed arms. His cheeks and hands were stained scarlet and his face twisted in terrible pain. Frantic with dread, he rushed into the house to lay his wife down on the couch. Following him closely, the rest of the club stumbled through the door, all bloody, and some of them injured. A few of the men and women had sustained serious injuries, but Erika called emergency services to send help while Nina and Sam aided the others with towels and hot water. Nina went and got the first aid kit Purdue kept under one of the seats of his 4x4..
“What happened?” Sam asked Erika after she completed the call.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked with a defensive frown.
“He is a friend of Val’s and mine,” Nina snapped in her trademark cattiness. Erika immediately loosened up and nodded. She looked at the attractive stranger whose curiosity glistened in his smoldering dark eyes.
“We were ambushed by an arm of their little gang on the road to the location we got from the vehicle trace we ran,” Erika explained. She reported on how the Sleipnir riders raced to rescue Gunnar, but on their way two of the black cars pulled out from the side of the road from opposite sides. The first few motorcycles had swung to avoid crashing into the vehicles. Some of them hit the back and sides of the SUV’s at full speed, while the next group who saw this, tried to swerve as well and went off the road. Some hit the trees, others crashed in the gorge on the right side of the deserted road.
It was not until Val noticed at a distance that something horrible had happened as The Brotherhood caught up with Sleipnir that they slowed down on her gesture. As was their protocol in such situations, some of the flanking riders broke away from the group and moved in the dark past the scene of the accident. Val was in front, followed by her eight main riders and they passed through the awful sight of their fallen men, to pursue the vehicle that held Gunnar on its way to the address they had acquired.
According to Erika, Gunnar had overpowered his two captors. The driver could do nothing and the skinny imp absconded as soon as the car came to a halt. Gunnar relieved them of their guns and finished them off, because he knew from experience that bad men had a tendency to resurface if left unattended to. When Val and her nine sisters approached from a distance, a bullet ripped through her front tire and sent her through the cold dark air and onto the tarmac at full force. Slokin had hidden and waited for Gunnar’s associates to show up. With his Beretta he shot at them when they came over the far hill of the road. Erika sank her chin and whimpered.