Gunnar was in the background, holding his wife’s broken and ravaged hands while Erika recounted. Nina wanted to see to Val, but she thought it would be inappropriate timing with her husband in the throes of trepidation. Val’s eyes stared into Gunnar’s, bloodshot and fading. Her lips moved with a faint quiver and he turned and bellowed, “Nina! Quick!”
She had previously told him about the historian who, like them, would do anything to vanquish the Black Sun’s intentions. Nina rushed to her side.
“Hey, badass,” Nina smiled and winked, but inside her a deep sorrow filled her as she held back the tears. The sight of Val’s skinned face and bloody, matted hair made Nina’s heart ache. Val tried to smile, but her split lip stretched to a gaping wound and she winced with a jolt of pain.
“Listen, Nina,” she panted in a whisper, hardly moving her mouth as she tried to speak perceptibly, “you h-have to keep that vial safe. G-guard it with your life. That redhead bitch … knows us, but she doesn’t know you. If she s-s-should drink…”
“Take your time. I’m listening,” Nina soothed, uncertain where she could place a consoling hand on the devastated body of her friend without evoking excruciating pain.
“Ifff she drank from it, she will f-find Valhalla, N-n-ina,” Val warned, her voice shivering with terror at the thought and she shook her head as much as she could to convey to Nina how this could never be allowed to come to pass.
“Alright, got it, Val. Don’t you worry, I won’t let that…”
“Redhead bitch…” Val smirked, and Nina entertained her defiance.
“…that redhead bitch get to Valhalla,” Nina smiled menacingly. She looked at the rune tattooed on Val’s forearm, the symbol that looked like an arrow pointing up, Tiwaz. Right there she secretly made a vow.
Gunnar knelt by Val’s side and tried to place his forehead against hers as gently as possible, as she did when he was in hospital. With his clear blue eyes drowning in tears, he looked into hers and whispered, “You are my sky. Without you the stars will fall. Without you I have no heaven.”
Nina’s hand clutched Sam’s arm. Like the others who had gathered around the dying Chieftain, they looked on in silence. Sam felt something burn in his chest and he battled the unrelenting tears.
“Your s-sky is always above y-you. All you h-h-have t-to do, is look up. I’ll be l-looking down on y-ou when you get battle-weary,” she said, flinching as her husband’s tears splashed onto her eyes.
Sam put his arm around Nina and he felt her hand slip into his. Val licked Gunnar’s earlobe as she always did to tell him she loved him.
“See you in Valhalla,” she smiled through tattered lips, her pain impotent to her spirit now, and with that Val Joutsen, Chieftain of The Brotherhood, closed her eyes for good.
Nina buried her face in Sam’s chest. Within the room, whimpers of sorrow and jerks of sobbing could be heard as those who were capable, embraced one another under the mournful bellow of the weeping Viking.
Chapter 18
Lita had finished analyzing most of the artifacts she had stored in her cold concrete vaults. The laser and x-ray tests yielded nothing. She had destroyed several precious antique artifacts in her relentless hunt for the vial that would help her find the location of Valhalla. Their shattered casings and ripped beading lay strewn across the floor where she walked with her bare feet on them, oblivious to the blood they drew from her. Lita was a maniac of intrepid beauty, her mind dismissive of the perceived impossible and her will unbending to any external hazard. In her favorite jeans, with her red hair in a long braid down the middle of her back, she paced the laboratory in her endless quest to inspect each and every old piece she could lay her hands on.
She had not slept in three days, but it hardly perturbed her. Along with psychological maladies, there sometimes came helpful side effects, like the imperviousness against the toils of sleep deprivation. The longer she did not sleep, the more she slid into states of contemplation, with waking dreams and visions, purely the product of her weary mind. However, many times this level of dangerous daze helped her think outside the box and to find her ideas with most clarity.
The last of the loot brought to her after the latest robbery proved to be void of what she sought. Filled with hopeless fury and frustration, Lita growled with her damaged voice, bent her knees to a crouch and flung the late Bronze Age Scandinavian urn hard against the wall. It clanged against the hard surface, dented, and clattered several feet across the floor.
“Fuck!” she screamed. She fell back on her ass on the cement floor and looked at the mess she had been making in the last few days. Among the battered and broken relics and beads, shattered stained glass, and crumpled up print-outs, patches of her dried blood stained the floor. Surprised, she realized what had happened and one after the other Lita checked the soles of her feet. They were dirty and in the dark grey residue that covered her soles she saw the welted dark brown wounds, some still wet from a fresh tearing.
“Well, shit,” she mumbled nonchalantly. She looked up at the blinding fluorescent lights that hummed in a mesmerizing key and she began to hum with them. The vibration of her breath on this note soothed her sore throat and she stood up to prepare another cup of coffee. Only when her maddening scrutiny had ceased with all the relics checked and found lacking, did she realize how exhausted she really was. Coffee would not suffice anymore. Lita left the place in a bloody mess of chaos and history, flicked the Off-switch on the machine and as she left the lab, she switched off the buzzing lights. She kept on humming in the dark corridor outside where she made her way to the black iron fire escape stairway.
“You had better have fantastic news for me, Jasper, or I’ll be publicly hanging you by your teensy little balls,” she threatened on the square device in her palm. He was on speakerphone and sounded somewhere between excited and terrified.
“Miss Røderic, you will not believe where The Brotherhood hides!” he spilled nervously.
“That’s not what I want to know, is it?” she barked with a mouthful of apple she had just picked from a bowl on the upper story dinner table.
“They hide in the bodies of women,’ he laughed frantically.
“Control yourself!” she yelled and swallowed. “Did they tell you where the vial is? Where are my men?”
“The remaining men are with me,” he said. “The others expired at the hands of those eight Valkyries we could not outrun, but we killed their leader. I’m almost positive!”
“The vial Slokin, the fucking vial! How many times do I have to ask you?” she rasped into the microphone.
“Oh, I have an idea how we can save ourselves a lot of trouble with that,” he said. “Professor Lockhart told me that they had picked up a pet. A historian he knows personally. If we could get to her, we could get things moving along quicker so that you can have your vision to Valhalla, my lady.”
“How will you know where she is?” she asked with a mild sliver of renewed hope.
“The Professor and our associates are … acquainted. He is not amicable with the Templars, so I believe if I play nice, we might persuade him to deliver her unto us,” Slokin said in an preacher’s tone that only vexed Lita.
“Then get to it, the days are drawing close, rapidly, and I have to find the Hall before the festival. Get a move on and get back to me soon. Otherwise I have a garrote here especially for those balls of yours.” With that Lita ended the call and ate the core of the apple.