

A Novella of

Copyright © 2019 by Jericho S. Wayne

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the author

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2019

ISBN 9780463933510

Published by Smashwords, Inc.

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with others, please encourage them to join the author's mailing list, as this work is intended to be available exclusively through the author's newsletter. Thank you for respecting the hard work and intellectual property rights of this author.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

Author's Note

Other Works

"Do you have a car, Mr. Campbell?"

Of all the questions Sage Grimmr Arnulfssen, head magus of the Portland Motherhouse of the Ordo Hermetica, could have asked me, that was the last one I would have predicted. I tightened my grip on my cell phone, wishing for just a fraction of a second that instead of plastic, metal and glass, I was lovingly caressing his windpipe as I choked his undead magickal ass out.

Grim and I have a complicated relationship.

I had been conspicuous by my absence around the Motherhouse and in magickal society generally, hoping the powers that be would forget all about me and what I'd done to earn my black belt. Or more accurately my blue sash, the one I never wore if I could help it. Now it appeared not only did they remember, but they had need of my unusual skills.

"No car," I answered tersely, waving my hand idly through a beam of late-summer sunshine which was shining over my left shoulder onto the table. Most vampires aren't up and around at noon, as far as I know. Yet another way in which Grim had managed to douse my expectations with gasoline, set them on fire and then roll a fleet of tanks over them with no more regard than if they'd been Chinese students protesting for democracy in Tiananmen Square. "And my license expired five months ago because see above regarding _no car."_

Grim knows a thing or ten about the kind of long, pregnant pause which gives one an itchy spot right in the dead center of one's back, between the shoulder blades. It's mostly an effective tool, especially in person.

But I knew time was on my side and against him, or he wouldn't have been calling me of all people. So I kicked my feet up on my coffee table and took a few sips of my iced tea, ostentatiously waiting for him to figure out curiosity wasn't going to kill _this_ cat.

It took less time than I expected. "Very well," he said. "Get to the DMV and get your license sorted out, then come to the Motherhouse."

"The car, Grim? I don't _have_ one," I reiterated. "Also, I'm between paychecks and just went grocery shopping."

Only about half of that statement was a fib, and I had the fridge full of food to prove it.

I don't actually _get_ steady paychecks. A steady paycheck requires having a steady _job._ I'd quickly found out the people who touted the benefits to job seekers of proven, "marketable" skills backed up by a fancy piece of very expensive paper fell into two camps. By and large, they were either well-meaning but clueless about the realities of life outside their ivory towers, or the kind of sadistic bloodsuckers who allow skeevy used-car salesmen to feel positively humanitarian by comparison.

The bulk of my income comes from doing various odd jobs, which I get using the sort of mobile apps you see plugged on TV all the time. I'd walked enough dogs to stretch across the entire Portland metro area from east to west, scooped enough poop to fill several semis, cleaned who knew how many apartments and homes for invalids, shut-ins and the sort of people who get reality TV shows made about them. But I felt a creeping suspicion that if I walked one more teacup poodle who was convinced it was _really_ a mastiff victimized by a deeply embarrassing clerical error, or walked into one more apartment piled high with six months' worth of rotting food and unwashed laundry, I might finally flip my shit and do something unfortunate enough to earn a starring role in one of those macabre basic-cable true crime shows.

Honestly, I was inclined to see what Grim was offering just for a change of pace, but there was no way in hell I was going to let _him_ in on that little secret.

Grim gave a low growl, which sounded a little funny because his usual conversational tone is so impossibly high and squeaky that it's practically a comedy staple. "Very well. I will send a driver for you. The driver will have sufficient money to get you your license."

"Nope," I said lazily.

"I beg your pardon." His tone dropped an octave, which might have made me just a little bit nervous if I didn't know that, badass magus or not, Grim couldn't _actually_ reach through the phone and throttle me into compliance.

"I said nope. Once I walk out my door, I'm on the clock. I expect to be paid from the moment I leave my house to the moment I return home, over and above whatever my license costs and the fee we negotiate for whatever act of war you want me to get myself involved in."

"What is your customary hourly rate?"

I quoted him a number some seven times what I would make for an average hour of dog walking, and three times what I would pull in for an hour of taking on a _Hoarders_ -level apartment, hoping the figure would be high enough to make him choose another crash dummy who had less to lose and more regard for the Motherhouse. He sputtered for a moment and threw out a significantly lower number.

I know the point of these negotiations is to reach a number no one really likes but which everyone agrees is a version of fair. The problem with haggling is, I'm contrary as hell and lack the patience to dicker. In that spirit, and certainly _not_ because it amused me to tweak Grim's twelve-hundred-year-old beard a little, I came back with a _higher_ price than originally stated.

"That's highway robbery," he snapped.

" _That's_ late-stage capitalism. You know, supply and demand?" I waved an airy hand, forgetting the gesture would be completely lost on him over the phone. Unless maybe it wasn't, because I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to learn he'd found some way to scry on me even through my house wards. _"You_ have a supply of money, and _I_ demand cash up front. _You_ need me to have a driver's license. _I_ don't have a car, and thus no need for one. So, since this benefits you a great deal more than it does me, you're either going to have to pay up, find someone else or leave whatever the hell you're up to undone."

In the ensuing silence, I could practically hear him running the numbers in his head. He wouldn't have called me if someone else could have done whatever errand he needed, given my abysmal depths of unpopularity in certain quarters of magickal society, which afforded me an unusual degree of leverage.

And he damned well knew we both knew it.

His voice dropped lower still, taking on a distinct Nordic flavor and a strong note of threat. "Fine. I will meet your original hourly rate plus the cost of your license. I strongly suggest you keep the details of this, er, _negotiation_ between us."

Yeah. Wouldn't want anyone knowing the all-powerful Sage got his nuts tweaked by the super-scary Soulforger everyone believes to be conveniently leashed and at your beck and call, now would we?

"I won't tell if you won't," I assured him.

"I will see you when you're done. My driver will have instructions to check in at each waypoint."

"Who should I expect?"

"Vincent Trujillo. I believe you two are acquainted."

I smiled genuinely for the first time all day. "We've met."

"Very well. I suggest you don't dawdle getting ready." My phone gave that weird little tritone beep that signals the other party has disconnected the call.

"Rude," I said to empty air.

: _One of these days, you're going to push him too far and he will call your cliff,_ empty air with a smoky feminine voice and a Russian accent heavy enough to drive railroad spikes with replied.

"Bluff, Svetalina." I retorted. "The word is 'bluff.'"

Anyone watching who didn't know better would have thought I was talking to myself, which, hey, I admit is very much a thing I do. The theoretical onlooker probably wouldn't have been reassured to learn the person with whom I was conversing was a spirit who was bound to the steel of an enchanted sword and lived in my head, a sort of supercharged, supremely and all too tangibly deadly imaginary friend. She hears everything I do, but I have to speak out loud for her to be able to hear me instead of chatting in my head, which has always struck me as one of the biggest ripoffs about being a Soulforger since the moment I became one.

: _We don't have time to assuage your overactive glands right now, David._

I tilted my head. "Huh?"

: _You_ like _to see me in the bluff, da?_

I had to seine that statement through several filters before I figured out what she meant. Continuing my efforts to educate my unseen companion on the finer points of American English idiom, I replied, "You mean 'buff,' in the sense of the slang term for being without clothes. 'Bluff' means either an attempt to deceive someone as to your actions or intentions; direct, friendly speech; or a steep cliff."

: _So I was right the first time and this little language lesson serves no purpose. And how can 'bluff' mean two completely opposite things?_

"We've been over this before, Svetalina," I said, tossing back the last of my iced tea to wet my whistle and get rid of it. "English has these things called homonyms. They're spelled the same, they sound the same, but their meanings are totally different. They come from different languages and parts of speech, so they're not interchangeable. Remember last week I was reading that book where the author kept talking about holding the 'r-e-i-g-n-s,' which spelled that way means to be presently ruling over something, instead of the 'reins' which would actually help the main character steer the horse?"

: _Russian has these also. And, yes, I remember. You threw the book across the room at least twice. Was it really_ that _bad?_

"Actually, overall, it _wasn't_ that bad, which made the fact the author, the editor and two gazillion beta readers missed such a major spelling error on multiple occasions even worse. She did it something like two dozen times that I caught—almost enough to make it a drinking game."

: _Which is relevant to my question how?_

"Okay, maybe it was a bad example. I was just trying to illustrate the point."

: _Well, you have. So we're back to my original question. Do you really think it's wise to call the Sage's bluff like that?_

"I think it was _necessary,"_ I shot back. "It does him good to remember I'm an ally of sorts, not his step-and-fetch monkey. Doing it this way costs us nothing but a little time, and it's a lot easier on the old knuckles than punching him in the face again."

: _To say nothing of the fact he'd likely kill you in your tracks if you tried,_ Svetalina mused. : _Da. It makes sense, David. But still, I think you've made an error. You need Grim's good graces more than he needs yours._

On one level, the spirit made an excellent point. If Grim decided he _really_ wanted to bring the rain down on me, I'd get all kinds of wet. I'm not fool enough to think I'm big or bad enough to take on the Sage in a straight-up fight, _mano e mano,_ as it were, and Grim hadn't survived twelve centuries by not knowing when to lay his tools aside before they cut into him.

On another level, I thought Svetalina was being maybe just the teensiest little bit paranoid. After all, Grim had already had plenty of opportunities to put me down for an eternal dirt nap and passed on them, which suggested I was still more useful _having_ a carbon footprint than _becoming_ one.

"Well, to hell with it. I got him to pay up." I stood up and stretched languidly. "It's going to be a good month."

: _Do you think you'll get the IRS paid off this year?_

"Probably not," I said, trying not to let the small cloud Svetalina's question had cast over my good mood steal my sunshine altogether. "But seriously, it's just a dunning letter. As long as I get it taken care of soonish, it'll be fine."

: _You_ hope, she retorted. : _Even supervillains know not to tangle with the tax people._

"See there? I should get a free pass just based on the fact I'm clearly one of the good guys," I said, spreading my hands. "And now, this good guy needs to change clothes."

"Dude. that shirt is _killing_ me, _mi hermano."_ Vincent Trujillo gave me the side-eye and mimicked trying to soothe a headache with the hand he wasn't using to steer the car.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked, glancing down in response to the criticism from my friend and sometime partner in crime. There might have been an incident involving a cow when we were both novices at the Motherhouse, occasioned by miscreants unknown.

Don't ask, because I won't tell.

"For one thing, _pendejo,_ it looks like Elton John, Jimi Hendrix and Steve Tyler teamed up to design the ugliest shirt in the history of clothes, then invited Ozzy Osbourne and Freddy Mercury over for the big reveal. But everyone got smashed and puked all over it."

"If that roster of rock legends had barfed on this shirt, it would never get washed again and I could probably retire with what Christie's would get for it."

"I don't know Christie. Is she cute?"

Now it was my turn to shoot him a sidelong glance. "The auction house, genius. Besides. You're married."

" _Ay, cabron,_ that's true, but _mi querida_ doesn't care if I admire the painting, as long as I don't try to bring it home with me," he replied, pressing his free hand to his heart. "But dude, real talk? I hope to Jesus you're wearing an undershirt, and I ain't talkin' about the gardener. If I have to watch you wear that ugly fucking thing for the next however long, I'll go blind. That means I won't be able to see _mi corazon_ tonight, and that would be a tragedy, man."

I did a double-take at his crack about the gardener, which I would have expected from one of those alt-right assholes who assumes anyone with a darker complexion than theirs and a name ending in an "-ez" construction must be the help. He snickered at me. I chuckled a little in turn, shaking my head, and looked at my shirt again.

Come to think of it, the shirt _was_ a little loud, the same way the light at the top of the Luxor in Las Vegas is a little bit bright.

My sister, Angie, had picked it out for me as a souvenir from one of her trips to Hawaii with her husband, Don. I'd only worn it once and noticed it fit me the same way socks would fit a rooster. Familial duty done, I'd promptly buried the clothing catastrophe in the back of my closet and been quite diligent about dismissing the garment's sheer eye-searing horror from my mental record until twenty minutes before, when I realized it would set the perfect tone for my meeting with Grim.

The shirt was supposed to be some big-deal vintage something or other, with polished coconut-shell buttons. To be fair, the buttons were the most subdued part of the shirt. The base fabric was watered silk, in a shade of red which would make the Kool-Aid guy speed-dial his therapist to work through some newly discovered inadequacy issues. Liberally overlaying the base were clusters of those weird little tropical flowers that remind me of paintball splatters in a riot of "warm" colors which made Day-Glo look beige. Anywhere there weren't flowers, the negative space had been filled in with some kind of leaping fish limned in an electric blue which clashed horribly with absolutely every other element of the shirt.

Threads like these would probably get me kicked out of every self-respecting Mardi Gras and Carnival celebration in the Western Hemisphere. I doubted even Gabriel Iglesias, the reigning king of the Hawaiian shirt, would be able to resist giving me grief over my chosen attire, assuming I were lucky enough to actually _meet_ Fluffy in real life and gauche enough to wear said threads for the meeting. Which made the monstrosity absolutely perfect for my purposes.

Not only would it annoy the hell out of Grim, but I would have incontrovertible, state-provided documentary proof that _See, Sis? I do_ so _wear the shirt you spent way too much on. Look, it's right here on my driver's license, see?_ See?!

Vincent turned into the Sherwood DMV. To my surprise, there weren't many cars in the lot. He got out of the car, lit a cigarette and started walking toward the street.

"Aren't you coming in?"

"Oh! Right!" He pulled a white envelope which had been folded double from the pocket of his basic white Dilbert shirt and tossed it to me. "Here you go."

I opened the envelope and my curiosity was rewarded with three crisp new Benjamins smiling serenely up at me. "Question stands," I said, looking up from the money. "Are you coming in?"

"Nah, man," he called, blowing a perfect smoke ring. Showoff. "I'ma wait out here, maybe give Lupe a little phone lovin', get her warmed up for when _Papi_ gets home, _entiendes?"_

I put the hand which wasn't full of more cash than I'd had at one time in months up in surrender. "Sorry I asked."

He snickered and shooed me away.

If you've seen one DMV, you've more or less seen them all: too many people packed too close together in dense little sardine-like clusters, all trying hard to mind their own business, looking varying shades of nervous or irritated while harried state employees moved around behind the counters in no particular hurry, since they're on salary and it makes no difference to them if others miss work because of their pace or lack thereof. I took a number from one of those little dispensers and suppressed an urge to moo.

A counter off to one side held the requisite forms, which I duly snatched up and filled out. I checked to make sure my birth certificate hadn't vanished in the last ten minutes (it hadn't) and that I had my expired license (I did). With nothing else to do, I settled in to wait.

Despite the seemingly glacial pace of the staff, the line moved surprisingly fast, and I soon found myself only three numbers back from the head of the line. It was right about that time that I noticed one of the DMV minions staring at me with just a little too much intensity.

If some uncouth type pressed me to guess her age, I'd have pegged her as probably old enough to drink and likely not old enough to get decent car insurance rates. She had red hair from a bottle, nice curves under her businesslike but attractive suit and eyes with that peculiar, muddled colorlessness you sometimes see when people with true hazel eyes wear blue-tinted contact lenses.

And she was staring directly at me from across the room as if she knew me from somewhere. Her expression hinted it might have been a wanted poster. My hackles began to itch in response to the intensity of her gaze. For a moment I considered inviting Svetalina into my eyes, but decided against it.

You see, because Svetalina's a spirit with magickal capabilities, she can pick up on a lot that I can't. The problem is, sharing sight with her guarantees a splitting headache and a dose of nausea which even Pepto-Bismol can't quiet.

There are two entities there's really no point in trying to fight: the IRS and the DMV, both of whom can plunge your life into new depths of misery with a few strokes on a keyboard. The magickal community is well aware of this, which means there's no telling who or what you might bump into in government buildings. Sure, the odds are everyone there is exactly what they claim to be, but would you _really_ want to know that cute, wholesome-looking cheerleader type or the earnest guy in the letter jacket is actually some kind of tentacular nasty doing a little human-style cosplay on an interdimensional tourist junket?

Time slowed down and my senses prickled as adrenaline sharpened them. I became acutely aware of the hushed conversations and shuffling of the people around me, as well as the low buzzing of a fluorescent light panel overhead, whose output seemed to swell in my eyes and ears until it was the loudest, brightest thing in the immediate universe.

I've read a bunch of stories by authors who give their main characters seemingly impossible handicaps for the modern age. Tech doesn't play nice with them, they can't use credit cards, stuff like that. These people can blow out tech just by standing too close to it or sneezing at the wrong time. Personally, I figure that sort of author as closet sadists, because seriously, who can navigate the modern world without a cell phone or Internet access? I shudder to imagine. Given my questionable luck, if I had a handicap like that, I'd probably nuke half the Pacific Northwest the first time I tried to heat up a fucking Pop-Tart.

Although, to be honest, right then I _did_ kind of wish I exuded my own little pocket field _a la_ Murphy's Law, just for the pleasure of accidentally-on-purpose making that stupid light cut out that stupid buzzing. Sure, I _could_ blow the fixture if I really felt the urge, but that would require employing a higher special effects budget and drawing a whole lot more attention than I really needed at the moment. Besides, government agencies tend to get cranky about willful destruction of public property, and I'm pretty sure light fixtures, even the irritating ones, fall on that list.

After a long moment, she nodded slowly and turned away, looking very busy and businesslike as she served her customer of the moment. I did a quick nose count and realized if she was snappy about it, I'd be the next one at her window. She was just trying to see who was likely to be her next contestant.

Sure. That had to be it.

A few minutes later, I heard my number over the paging system, directing me to the redhead. Dutifully I trudged over, ignoring the resentful eyes at my luck, and presented my documents.

"David Edward Campbell?" she asked, reading it from my birth certificate. She gave me a quick once-over and returned her attention to my documents.

I always cringe a little when people use my full name. It's so plain and bland, the vanilla froyo or maybe the Honda Civic of names. Probably fifty guys with my name in the Portland area, and fifty thousand of them scattered around the country. It's the kind of name which blends into white wallpaper, kind of like my genetics, which all but ensure I don't often get noticed unless I really work at it.

"That's me," I said a little weakly.

"You left renewing your license a little late, didn't you?" She looked back up at me and gave me a friendly smile which didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Yeah. Car trouble." I didn't bother explaining the trouble was the fact my car had been repossessed.

"No problem," she assured me, "but it's easier if you renew early."

I summoned up a weak grin. "I'll do that next time."

She typed a few notes into the computer, then turned away to make a photocopy. To hell with the danger or the discomfort; I needed to know what I was up against here.

"Svetalina, eyes," I muttered, bracing myself against the counter as I moved my mental furniture around to allow the spirit space to see out. A second later, a crimson haze washed over my vision. When the red vanished, I blinked hard and looked around, paying special attention to the woman who was making copies—and gulped as her human guise melted away to reveal the spooky goodness beneath.

Whatever it was, it was basically humanoid, as in more or less bilaterally symmetrical with a clearly defined head, and female if the outsized breasts suitable for an anime character were anything to go by, but that was where any resemblance to a proper human being ended. Purple skin covered with pustules in some places and sickly, translucent smoothness in others vied with a pointed tail which lashed around the ankles of her backward-jointed legs. Leathery, batlike wings drooped from its shoulders.

Much of its body consisted of a confusing mishmash of spare parts: a heavily muscled torso, arms which ended in wickedly curved talons, leonine legs and a lashing tail which seemed to marry the worst traits of a lion and a lizard. Its stubby head featured proud, slightly crooked horns protruding from the sides of its forehead like those of an ibex and a disproportionately large mouth filled with chompers fit to outclass the average T-Rex. It had way too many glowing, orange, spiderlike eyes grouped in fours, an abbreviated snout whose nostrils were just slits in its face, centered beneath and between the ranks of its eyes. In its true form, its head barely reached the discharge tray for the copy machine.

Alien as the critter was, its aura was worse still. It hovered in the air around the creature like a painting of an exploding kaleidoscope as imagined by a madman amped out on some of the better hallucinogens with which modern chemistry has graced our world.

I shut Svetalina out of my sight, _fast_. There's just no good outcome to be had from seeing things like that all the time, things whose mailing addresses aren't located in our reality. A lot of people have been driven out of their minds or misdiagnosed with all sorts of mental illnesses, as a result of looking at the wrong things too often or at inopportune times.

Turning away, I surveyed the room and saw a little blonde girl with eyes the size of saucers, staring more or less at the woman, patting her inattentive mom's lap urgently in a futile bid to get her to look up from her outdated fashion magazine. The poor kid couldn't have been more than six or maybe seven, much too young for her face to bear that look of sheer terror.

There was nothing I could do for her right then, but I made a mental note to have a word with Grim and see if the Motherhouse could intervene to help the girl in some way before she developed a drug problem, catatonia or any number of even worse problems. Natural seers are only slightly less rare than Soulforgers, and I hate seeing kids needlessly terrified because they learn too early just how scary and unfriendly the world can truly be.

"Here you go," the woman said brightly, handing my forms back to me. "Take this over to the testing station, turn it in, have a seat and wait for your name to be called." At the exact same time, I heard the exact same voice inside my brain, only tainted with a slithering, curdled back tone which made me think of things left in the refrigerator until they began to develop a language and culture of their own.

I know what you seek, Soulforger. You won't succeed.

My jaw tightened. _Wish you'd let_ me _in on the secret, and how do you know me anyway?_ "Thank you," I said simply, resolutely marching away from the counter.

The next agent was a vanilla human guy in his late fifties, with swarthy, Hispanic features and a formidable gut which suggested someone in his household was an exceptionally good cook. He barely glanced my way as I deposited the papers in the inbox, offering the barest hint of a nod. "About fifteen minutes," he said tonelessly, going through the ritual. "Sit down over there," he added, gesturing to a pod of uncomfortable-looking chairs facing the entrance to the testing alcove.

I followed his directions, situated myself in a chair which proved every bit as unpleasant as I'd expected and looked back at the whosit. To my alarm, she was now talking with the little blonde girl's mother. The poor kid looked like she was going to pee herself, hiding half behind her mom's back as she shook with fear. Call me a barbarian if you like, but I don't much care about grownups who get the shit scared out of them. Given how many of them do so recreationally by indulging in slasher movies, throwing themselves from perfectly good airplanes with oversized handkerchiefs strapped to their backs and similar adrenaline-inducers, it's hard to have much sympathy. But I have a soft spot for kids.

"You'll get yours, bitch," I muttered under my breath.

: _It's a cacodemon,_ Svetalina said.

"A kaka- _who_ now?"

: _Cacodemon_ , she repeated, enunciating clearly. : _Nasty customers, those. If you get the opportunity to put it down, you should take it._

"Tell me."

She did, and I had to work to keep myself looking loosely relaxed and mildly bored as I listened.

Look up "cacodemon" on Google and you'll just find "evil spirit" and a hatful of references to video games. In the magickal world, they meant something else again: creatures who hail from a world beyond and yet linked to our own, whose laws and physics only loosely echo what we think of as the natural order. Call the place Hell, Infernos, Acheron, Tartarus or any of the other thousand less pleasant variants of the afterlife humans have managed to name or make up, and it'll probably fit the bill. They're agents of chaos and entropy, but relatively stupid and easy to put down.

And when they show up on the radar, they need to be put down _fast,_ before they can do any damage.

Which didn't explain why a cacodemon would work at the DMV, of all the ridiculous places.

: _Fear,_ Svetalina said. : _They feed on the fear and uncertainty of the people who come through here, and the distress and pain they can cause by denying simple requests or ensuring the process is needlessly difficult. Even better is when they find someone who_ knows _them for what they are, because they're captives of the law and have no choice but to be in their presence._

"The girl," I murmured. "She'd be a rich source of fear."

: _Undisciplined, young, bursting with hopes and dreams and no sense of limits or bounds to what she can do?_

"Jesus. It's like the universe hands the thing cheesecake every damned day." I pointedly turned away, staring at the wall.

: _What are you going to do?_

"Now? Nothing. I need that damned license, as Grim so pointedly informed me. But _later_ —"

My eyes narrowed. "I'll settle up with it later."

The test for an Oregon driver's license is done on a computer. In theory, it's thirty-five questions long. In practice, as I learned to my delight ten minutes later, if you get twenty-eight right, the test automatically gives you a pass and shuts down. I went to check out of the testing area and the proctor handed me back my sheaf of documents, the thickness of which was starting to get just a little silly. He directed me back across the lounge to the waiting area for photos, and I hopped to it. The little girl and her mom were nowhere to be seen, but the cacodemon tracked me across the room with a smug, secretive grin on its glamoured face. She winked, blew me a cheeky kiss and called up her next customer...contestant...victim...whatever.

Getting my picture taken went quickly, and I was a little disappointed the guy working the camera didn't say anything about my snazzy shirt, but I was just as happy to sit for my picture, pay my tribute to Caesar for the privilege, take my paper temp license and get lost. Part of me was a little surprised the cacodemon hadn't screwed with my public record, but I reasoned she wouldn't want to start a nasty public exchange with someone like me if she could avoid it. After all, magi stick together. Grim, and by extension the Motherhouse, wields enough political clout even in the mundane world that a complaint from him would probably be enough to get a low-ranking civil servant axed.

No way she'd want _that_ kind of heat.

I stepped from air-conditioned, vaguely dusty, fluorescent-lit dimness into bright, hot sunshine in the parking lot. My cell phone informed me I'd been less than seventy-five minutes from none to done. Good running for a trip to the DMV, which explained why Vincent had brought me here. He was standing out at the curb, which fronted on a pleasant little tree-lined street with a mishmash of government offices and various industrial concerns, just off the main drag of Tualatin-Sherwood Road. When he saw me, he dropped his cigarette and scuffed it out with the toe of his shiny black Oxford.

"You get it?"

I held up the paper printout.

"Fuck, dude. I'm staying off the sidewalks."

I made a friendly and anatomically improbable suggestion involving things he might do with himself, barnyard animals and a leaf blower.

He sneered and jutted his chin at the car. "Let's go. I'm driving."

"You're welcome to it," I said. Because Vincent did a lot of chauffeuring and errand-running for the Motherhouse, the car he was currently piloting was one of those ludicrously long and wide land yachts, its white paint buffed to a high glow and the burgundy interior immaculate. Call me crazy, but I like smaller rides, where I know where everything is and don't have to change time zones to reach the glovebox from the driver's seat.

We bantered all the way to the Motherhouse, just catching up. Lupe was pregnant with their second kid, and he fervently hoped this one would be a boy. The politics of the Ordo Hermetica remained just as weird, counterintuitive and convoluted as anywhere else these days, although he did offer up a couple of funny stories about some novices who'd decided to try to replicate the cow stunt. They'd failed, of course, for lack of a few key ingredients which I'll never disclose. Still, I admired their ambition and desire to stand on the shoulders of giants.

As we talked, I felt a little twinge of conscience that I hadn't kept in closer contact with him after completing my novitiate, especially given Vincent was one of the few real friends I had. On the other hand, I liked Vincent enough not to want him unnecessarily tainted by association with me. Having a spooky reputation which makes necromancers look like well-adjusted solid citizens by comparison isn't an entirely bad thing, but Vincent had a wife and a growing family to support. He didn't need my legacy dogging his footsteps; his family gave him a lot more to lose than I would ever likely have.

The Portland Motherhouse is situated on a low mountain which yields a breathtaking panoramic view of the metro area and its bridges, all the way to Mt. Hood to the east and Mt. St. Helens to the north on a clear day. From the street, it looks like your average postmodern split-level home with a price tag of somewhere north of one and a half million bucks, the kind which has lots of glass and metal involved in its construction. I could give you the actual, physical address and you'd never get to the door, although you might see the façade of the place as you drove by.

In actuality, the Motherhouse is a freaking castle which wouldn't look out of place in most of Central and Eastern Europe. If we'd gone through the front, I'd have been able to see the Motherhouse as it truly is. Instead, Vincent used one of those radio transmitter thingies clipped to his sun visor to make the perfectly normal-looking garage door raise, piloting the car inside. Instead of a two-car garage, though, we made our way down a dimly lit ramp which corkscrewed down into the earth and ended at a parking area large enough for a couple dozen cars, a large panel van, a modified school bus and even a semi with a nondescript corporate logo, all part of the diverse fleet of legitimate, mundane or mundane-ish businesses which covered much of the Motherhouse's operational overhead and allowed people to go in and out without hassle or drawing attention.

He steered the car smoothly into a parking spot, cut the engine and popped the locks. I stepped out into air twenty degrees cooler and with much higher humidity than that in the open air, blinking against the intensity of the banks of recessed can lights set into the surprisingly high ceiling.

"You'd better hurry, _mi hermano,"_ Vincent said from the other side of the car, where he was rubbing down the dashboard with a white cloth. "The Sage doesn't like to be kept waiting."

"All right. Call me, we'll get a beer, okay?"

"You got it, brother." He did one of those gangsta-style salutes, rapping his fist sharply against his sternum over his heart twice and then holding out his hand in a peace sign. I mirrored the gesture and made my way to the elevator at the end of the cavern. The door opened immediately in response to my touch on the up button, and I stepped in and punched the button marked "4."

When the doors opened again, they revealed a white corridor with thick blue Berber carpet and understated lighting. At the other end, a quartet of people wearing dark suits which each cost three times what my last car had stood in a staggered diamond formation. Each one held a polearm rigidly erect. The subtle tingle in the air which set the fine hairs on my arms on edge told me the weapons were enchanted.

These were Grim's personal guard, the apex of the elite among the Motherhouse's Rekkrs, literally "warrior men" in Norwegian. Every Motherhouse around the globe has them, under different names: Guardians, Wardens, _Smotritel'_ in Russian, _Aufseher_ in German, _Prabandhak_ in Hindi. No matter what you call them, they're enforcers, warriors and soldiers, tasked with enforcing the laws of magickal society and defending against magickal threats to both the supernatural and mundane world. These people were the best, most powerful and most dangerous of them all.

"State your business," the woman nearest the door, a woman with a dark complexion, a red caste mark between and slightly above her eyes and a lilting accent, demanded coolly.

"David Campbell to see the Sage. I'm expected."

She touched a hand to her left temple and nodded. "Do you have any magickal artifacts or weapons about your person?"

"No," I said, more or less honestly. I didn't see any need to get the Rekkrs all excited by telling them I had a spirit-possessed sword just across the veil in a pocket dimension less than six inches from my right hand. Assuming they didn't already know, if I didn't actually draw Svetalina, I'd be in the clear. In retrospect, that was a slightly silly and fairly dangerous assumption to make, given that people highly ranked enough to be guarding the Sage would also have been present when I earned my sash and thus would have known _exactly_ what I'd done to get it.

Which _also_ meant they wouldn't exactly be charter members of the David Campbell Fan Club.

She gave me a skeptical look, reached into the jacket of her suit and produced a clear crystal on a fine silver chain. Holding it still and perpendicular to the floor, she asked, "Does he speak the truth?"

The crystal began to swing gently forward and backward, toward me and then back to the Rekkr, in steady, stately oscillations.

With a satisfied nod, she put the pendulum away. "You may proceed, Mr. Campbell."

I sidled past the Rekkrs, trying not to look like I was seeing a gruesome little speculative movie concerning what those enchanted polearms might do to my tender bits and pieces if they perceived me as a threat. Each magus pinned me under their gaze as I passed, uniformly neutral expressions seeming to say they didn't know what I'd done, when or how, but they knew I'd done _something_ to warrant their attention. All they needed was an excuse to go digging for it.

The door swung open of its own accord.

"Come in, David. I'm afraid I don't have all day," came Grim's signature high-pitched voice.

I stepped inside and the door closed on its own, leaving me in the private inner sanctum of the most powerful magus on the West Coast.

If old-school Vikings as a class had still been around during the Roaring Twenties, they might have looked something like Grimmr Arnulfssen.

Or at least their clan chiefs would have.

He wore a fastidiously clean, navy-blue pinstriped three-piece with nary a trace of lint to be seen, his snowy white shirt and red-and-gold-striped power tie standing in shocking contrast to the suit's subdued elegance. Tolkien's dwarves would have been seethingly jealous of Grim's formidable beard, and the most hardened one-percenter motorcycle clubs would have stood in awe of the scars on his face and hands, the legacy of his early life leading raiding parties across Northern Europe and the New World.

Seated, the Sage was nearly tall enough to look me in the eye. Even by modern NBA and NFL standards he was huge, the kind of guy who could win games just by scuffing his big toe on the gridiron or hardwood and watching the other team shit themselves into panicked unconsciousness. In his original age, he'd have been considered a Goliath. The fact he was a true-born vampire descended from the oligarchy of his native land would only have added to the terror he could inspire.

In the grip of a nearly suicidal fury, I'd once punched this guy in the face.

Don't look at me like that. Trust me, I had my reasons.

"David," he said. "Please, sit. Would you care for a drink?"

"Oh. Um. Sure." I pointed to the tankard on his desk. "Whatever you're having?"

"It's early in the day yet. This is ale."

"You drink _beer_ for breakfast?"

"No," Grim said with exaggerated patience as he reached one hand below the surface of his desk. The distinctive rasp of a drawer opening followed in short order. "I drink _rats_ for breakfast. Or at least their blood. And I don't waste my time on mere _beer._ " His eyebrows lifted and his eyelids narrowed, transforming his face to the aspect of the sort of mountain whose mercurial moods forced hapless parties of adventurers below ground and into confrontations with Balrogs and such. "Ale is more of a lunchtime beverage, which helps prevent me from slowly throttling importunate Soulforgers who test my patience before I'm properly awake."

He straightened with a sweating, frost-rimed growler half-full of liquid and an earthenware mug about half the size of his in his hand. The demonstration reminded me of two things. First, if he ever _lost_ that paw, he'd have to swipe the anchor from an aircraft carrier to function a suitably sized replacement. Second, the hand could have itself a hell of a second act as the rim for a Mack truck.

"Have you tried yoga?" my mouth asked brightly, while my hindbrain lit up in the biological equivalent of one of those emergency klaxons from _Star Trek_ and began begging me urgently to shut my stupid yap.

"You're only about a quarter as funny as you believe yourself to be, Mr. Campbell," Grim replied in a perfectly calm, flat tone, filling the mug and sliding it across the desk. He raised his tankard high. _"Skol."_

" _Salud,"_ I answered, echoing his gesture. We clacked cups and drank. The beer, excuse me, _ale_ was excellent.

Grim set his tankard aside with a little sigh. "Now, let's get down to business."

"Do let's," I agreed, taking another pull of my beer.

"A friend of mine is in town and needs to get something to me for safekeeping. However, he cannot come to the Motherhouse. There might have been a misunderstanding of sorts, somewhere around—" His brow furrowed, a move which seemed to take several seconds longer than strictly necessary just because there was so _much_ brow there to furrow. "—the beginning of the twentieth century, concerning his alleged involvement with a particularly destructive fire."

"How many people around the Motherhouse would still remember that, especially at firsthand?" I asked, thunderstruck. Magi aren't especially long-lived due to the ridiculously high metabolic pace and entropic resonance which using magick imposes on their bodies, which is also a reason you will seldom encounter a heavyset magus. Even if they cheat by using magick, their bodies tend to deteriorate fast around the seventy-year mark, so you wind up with a bunch of people shambling around looking like their coffins were buried with unseemly haste.

Grim got a bye on that, vampire longevity and endurance being what they are. To outward appearances, he was maybe in his mid-forties. A little quick back of the napkin calculation suggested he was aging at about two point six years per century, which meant he would have had one hell of a case of babyface for around three hundred years.

Considering that, I was a little surprised he didn't have a bigger chip on his mountainous shoulder.

He smoothed one hand down his beard. "Enough that I wouldn't care to take the chance unnecessarily. Therefore, I must send a courier to him." Grim steepled his fingers and gave me a Significant Look. "Someone who can recognize temporal magick and thus can discern whether the article in question is real or not."

"In other words, you need me," I said, hoping to cut to the chase. "What exactly is this whatever the hell it is I'm supposed to be retrieving?"

"Have you heard of Draupnir?"

Although the name wasn't instantly familiar to me, Svetalina perked up. : _Draupnir was Odin's enchanted ring. Every nine days it created eight copies of itself, each of equal quality and perfect fidelity to the original._

"Odin, as in the king of the Norse gods?" My voice cracked a little, and I tried to convince myself it had done so out of incredulity rather than a flood of sheer, testicle-tightening terror. "And this ring is, like—what? Some kind of mystical photocopy machine?"

Grim snickered a little. "Something like that. Draupnir has a cursed counterpart called Andvaranaut."

I flinched as my stomach lurched in a most unpleasant way. Hauling the ring allegedly owned by the Norse version of Zeus all over Portland on my fragile-skinned person would be one thing, albeit a hell of a scary one. Chauffeuring its cursed twin around sounded an awful lot like the sort of job I wanted absolutely no part of.

"Which does what, exactly?"

: _It detects treasure, specifically gold._

"It senses gold," Grim answered in unconscious echo of Svetalina. "Loki stole it from the original owner, Andvari, along with Andvari's riches. In retribution, Andvari cursed Andvaranaut to bring misfortune and ruin upon whoever possessed it. Loki offered it to a king as weregild for killing his kinsman, thus transferring the main portion of the curse onto the king and his line. One of the king's descendants slew him and transformed himself into a dragon so as to guard his horde more ably. However, Loki could not wholly avoid the curse because of his inability to stop scheming, and passed the ring on to Odin. It was the murder of Baldur through Loki's machinations which called down the wrath of all Asgard upon his head, and many believe there is a direct correlation between Loki's stewardship of Andvaranaut and his current straitened circumstances. There is a school of thought which holds Odin is doomed to face the Ragnarok because he had direct, albeit brief, contact with Andvaranaut."

"Hrm," I murmured, to show I was paying attention. It had been many a year since I'd read any version of the Norse mythos, but the image of Loki chained to a rock in a cave while a snake dripped venom into his eyes until the Viking version of the end of days had stuck hard with me, mainly because of the parallels to the fate of Prometheus in Greek lore.

"So, let me get this straight," I said, sitting fully erect and tossing off the last of my beer, which suddenly seemed to have lost all its flavor. "You want me to get this cursed ring from a friend of yours who's managed to piss off the entire Motherhouse, get it back to you for safekeeping without pulling a heavy-duty case of cursed down on myself, and do it all under the radar. Do I have that right?"

Grim nodded, steepling his fingers in a superior manner which he knows bugs the shit out of me. Which is probably why he does it, now that I think of it. "There are hints in the lore suggesting a Soulforger can be in close proximity to Andvaranaut for brief periods without incurring the ring's curse. Practically speaking, so long as you refrain from actually handling the ring directly, you should be able to carry its container safely with no ill effects."

"Hints. Suggestions. Should." I gave him a narrow-eyed glare. _"Not_ exactly brimming with confidence over here, Grim."

"Then it is fortunate I have sufficient faith for both of us." He raised an eyebrow. "I will have a check waiting for you when you return with Andvaranaut."

"How will I know if it's real?" I asked.

"Andravanaut copies itself every nine days. Fortuitously, today is the ninth day of its cycle. You will go to this address."

He pushed a piece of paper across the desk, and I glanced down just long enough to register the location was out in Troutdale, on the northeast side of the metroplex but still on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, which was a small mercy. Infinitesimal, to be honest.

"When you arrive, ask for Mr. Jens Hagen. He will be expecting you. Give him the name Jeffrey Chandler. He will take you into the back of his shop and let you watch the ring replicate so you can be sure it is the genuine article. Once you've satisfied yourself as to the ring's bona fides, he will place it into a lead-lined steel box and seal it into a briefcase with a combination lock which you will not have. You return here, give the case to me and off you go for home, several hundred dollars richer and with a brand-new driver's license to boot." He spread his hands. "Everyone wins."

I knew I shouldn't ask, but my mouth vetoed my brain and charged ahead. "And what does the Motherhouse want with it?"

"Safekeeping," Grim said, his face and name matching up in a most forbidding manner. "This is not the sort of trinket one needs or wants roaming the streets where any random person could get their hands on it. It has a long, blood-soaked history which we would prefer not to repeat. We would like to study it and see if we can replicate its more helpful properties while omitting the unfortunate and dangerous ones."

"Seems like a lot of cloak and dagger for a ring, but okay," I said. "When do I leave?"

Grim picked up the phone on his desk. "Ms. Gibson? I have David Campbell in my office. He is on an errand for me and will need a car. Please see to it he has something suitable." He listened for a moment and nodded. "That will do. Thank you." Replacing the phone in its cradle, he raised his head.

"You leave _now."_

"Ah, here you are!" The perky brunette I presumed to be Ms. Gibson bent over, giving me a gratuitously excellent look at a more than adequate posterior encased in tight red jeans as she rooted around in a cabinet on a wheeled podium like you see at a lot of valet stations. She straightened up and I quickly made sure my eyes were fixed on approximately where her nose would be rather than where I was sure she'd meant for me to look. She tossed me a little black key fob. "Special ride."

I thumbed the unlock button on the fob and winced as the headlights on a bland white hybrid about halfway down the aisle blinked. "Any chance of getting something—" I stumbled for a moment as my tongue's desire to say _more butch_ came into direct conflict with my brain's imperative to try not to piss anyone else off today. "—a bit bigger?" I finished lamely.

She gave me a sadistically cheerful, poisonous smile. "I'm afraid not," she said. "It's Motherhouse policy to try to limit the environmental damage we do on special errands. However, it's just been serviced, fully charged and gassed up." Something lurking in the corners of her smile suggested she wouldn't be terribly upset if I gave her lip about the ride. "Of course, if you'd prefer, you're more than welcome to use your _own_ vehicle," she purred, indicating she knew damned good and well that I didn't have access to any such thing, rendering her offer nothing more than an exercise in toxic sophistry. "I'm sure the Sage would be _pleased_ to reimburse you for mileage."

_Ha ha ha_ , I thought darkly. "No, this will be fine," I grumbled with all the limited good grace I could muster.

"Please bring it back in one piece," she called as I shuffled toward the shoebox on wheels. It was one of the four-door models, and I experienced a wave of irrational gratitude to my vanilla genetics that I'm not taller than I am. The space between seat and steering wheel looked like it would be a tight squeeze as it was.

To be fair, I had wished for something smaller than Vincent's customary wheels. But there had to be a happy medium somewhere in between.

I got in and the car immediately said, "Pairing," in a pleasantly impersonal feminine voice.

"Pairing what?" I said aloud. Then a little phone icon on the dash started to blink. "Oh." Okay, I had to admit, that was kind of a cool perk. Apparently the magickal technogeeks at the Motherhouse had found a way to make the bespoke fleet of cars as idiot-proof as possible for the drivers, right down to automatically pairing their mobiles without any intervention _from_ the drivers.

I started the gerbilmobile and was rewarded by a thin, nearly inaudible little whine. " _Please fasten seat belt,_ " the car prompted me.

Just for funsies, I put the car in reverse, let off the brake and pushed down on the gas—and nothing happened. " _Please fasten seat belt_ ," the car chided again.

"Oh, this is just _perfect,"_ I growled, clicking the damned seatbelt into place and hitting the gas again. This time the car moved, and I oriented myself, starting up the ramp leading to the street. "The car has no balls but it's a total seatbelt Nazi."

: _You_ could _be relying on public transit,_ Svetalina pointed out.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. "Svetalina, _please_ stop cheering me up."

A Rekkr with a clipboard jotted a couple of notes briskly as I rolled past at a brisk three miles per hour, getting used to the quirks of the car's steering and control systems, then waved me onward. The illusion of garage doors melted away as the nose of the car crossed its plane and I found myself in the open air, turning onto the street.

After making my way through the warren of narrow one-way streets just south of the Portland State University campus and making a loop just east of the Portland Art Museum, I finally crossed the Hawthorne Bridge and found my way to I-5 North. Traffic crawled along like a concussed snail, and I snarled seething imprecations several times as people in bigger vehicles (which consisted of five out of every six on the road, to be fair) decided they needed the space my borrowed conveyance was occupying more than I did, forcing me to brake sharply or risk giving them an education in physics and earning myself a ding on my hours-old license.

An eon later, I got on I-84, and traffic improved gradually the further I got from the city center. By the time I reached the I-205 interchange, traffic was zipping along at a relatively peppy forty miles an hour, but I was still twenty-some minutes from my destination.

"Did Grim ever actually say _when_ the ring was supposed to spawn?" I asked.

: _No, he didn't. I suspect he made sure you left in plenty of time to not miss it, even with Portland traffic._

"That would be in character," I agreed. In an effort to make my body believe everything was okay, I deliberately tensed every muscle in my body one at a time, starting from my toes and working up to my head, before releasing them all at once. The resultant relaxation wasn't quite as good as a four-hands Swedish massage, but it was the best I'd be able to do on my own, so I called it sufficient.

Troutdale isn't _quite_ the back of beyond by PDX standards, but the town doesn't miss by much. On the upside, the drive is lovely. As I passed Government Island, I noticed a flotilla of sailboats on the Columbia River, taking advantage of the beautifully clear summer day. The people on the river looked like they were having a lot more fun than I was, probably because I was on the sort of errand which seems to demand overcast skies or better yet, total darkness and ominous organ music.

My phone rang through the car's sound system, startling me so badly I almost put the car into the concrete barrier rails lining the center of the road. I barked a sulfurous oath, corrected and dragged the car back on a straight line in the appropriate lane by main strength just as the car automatically opened the line.

The voice issuing from the speakers cemented my utter hatred of hybrids for all time and eternity.

"Are you meeting us for breakfast tomorrow?" my sister Angie asked.

I closed my eyes for a second and bit back another, more subtle curse. "Yeah! Yeah, I'll be there."

"You sound funny. Where are you?" Angie demanded.

"I had to run an errand for a friend." My standing policy concerning answering questions like that from my family is to stick as close to the truth, with as much brevity, as I can possibly manage.

"Since when do _you_ have friends?"

"I'll have you know I'm a very likeable and popular guy in some circles, Sis."

"Yeah? Like what?"

I gritted my teeth. "Bulgaria, Ang. I'm _huge_ in Bulgaria."

"Smartass," she complained.

"What time are we meeting?"

"Mom wants to go to that new fusion place over on Boone's Ferry. So—ten?"

"Sounds good." I found my exit coming up at last, and made my way apologetically over to the right. The driver of the jacked-up eighties-model Ford pickup flying the Stars and Bars behind me laid on the horn, letting me know I was in the way, a nuisance and unreasonable burden to both good, patriotic, God-fearin' Americans everywhere and people using the freeway for its intended purpose. I contemplated honking back, but decided just being behind the wheel of this car had given my manhood enough of a pounding for one day and instead skulked my way onto the offramp.

"Hey, Sis, I gotta go. I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?"

"Ten o'clock, David! If you leave me alone with Mom and I have to listen to her complain about your—"

I found a button with a phone icon on the steering wheel and gave it an experimental jab. Angie's voice cut off abruptly. "Oops," I said. Just then the pickup roared past me as the driver laid on the gas, immersing me in a cloud of choking exhaust fumes which reached my nose even through the closed windows.

"Dick," I muttered, and turned right at the bottom of the hill, trying to ignore the low, building throb of a tension headache just behind my eyeballs.

The directions led me around to a little strip mall on the back side of the Columbia Gorge Outlet Mall. When I pulled up, I frowned for a moment until I located the right suite number.

"A pawnshop?"

: _It makes sense,_ Svetalina said. :I _'m sure lots of magickal artifacts get bought, sold and moved around through places like this._

That notion struck me as acutely disquieting. I tried to imagine, oh, say, Excalibur turning up in a hock shop where anyone with enough money could get at it, and suppressed a shiver. According to legend, to possess Excalibur was to claim rightful rulership of the British Empire. I could easily imagine some anime nerd, or worse yet a politician, stumbling across the mythical weapon, picking it up for a song and realizing they'd not only purchased an excellent blade but gotten an entire freaking country tossed into the bargain for good measure. Since I believe most politicians shouldn't be entrusted with sporks, never mind the national coffers or deadly weapons, I figured I'd probably wake up screaming several times in the next several nights out of nightmares about one Armageddon scenario or another.

"Terrific," I mumbled, unbuckling my safety harness and forcing myself free of the car. "I swear, they don't make these things to accommodate normal-sized people. I'll have to talk to Grim about making sure he can drive whatever he foists off on his runners. Maybe then he'll pop for _actual_ cars."

: _Must you complain about everything, David?_

"I'm not complaining. I'm noting a deficiency in Motherhouse-provided equipment for the consideration of the Sage."

: _As I said, must you complain about everything?_

"Ixnay on the alk-tay," I whispered, opening the door.

The pawnshop's interior looked basically like any other chain pawnshop around the country. A smattering of people milled around, browsing idly at the merchandise on display, treasures people had forfeited to the pawn industry for gas money or rent or booze or even more unsavory things.

One section of the store played host to a lot of middling-to-decent computer equipment and late-model video game systems. Another hosted musical instruments, mainly guitars, keyboards and related accoutrements. Sporting goods, rifles, shotguns, coats and jackets, stereos and TVs, oh my.

In the center of the store's open floorplan, a largish island of glass cases contained shelves with row upon row of knives and handguns, which gave way to jewelry ranging from some epically ugly costume stuff at which my great-grandmother would have turned up her nose as being too gaudy to graceful, elegant rings, necklaces and earrings which were probably worth ten times what their owners had hawked them for.

A woman with hair the shade of a raven's pinfeathers and proportions which made the average Valkyrie look a bit scrawny hunkered in the open space at the center of the island. She whirled to face me so quickly and with so many secondary tectonic shifts beneath her kelly-green polo shirt that I half expected a blast of wind from her direction, raising up as she spun.

"Can I help you find something?"

I screwed my most winning smile onto my face, which admittedly isn't saying much, and nodded as if I knew exactly what I was up to. "My name is Jeffrey Chandler. I believe Jens Hagen is expecting me."

Her sharp-featured face contorted itself into the sort of smile hungry cats wear when they look at plump baby mice. It was a look which had neither concept nor concern for the word "reassuring."

"Is that so?" She placed her hands on the glass countertop and leaned forward, causing the fragile surface to bow alarmingly. "And may I ask to what this is in regards?"

The verbal construction was technically grammatically perfect, but few people from these parts actually talk that way on purpose unless they're trying to show off how much more worldly, and wordy, they are than the average pick-a-nick basket. Or asking to get punched in the face, I suppose. Tomato, toe-mah-toe.

"I'm only at liberty to discuss that with Mr. Hagen," I said hastily.

"Then I'm afraid Mr. Hagen is not in," she retorted, summarily banishing me from notice as anyone of any importance.

"Ma'am, I don't mean to be rude, but I was assured Mr. Hagen would be here and expecting me."

"And I've assured _you_ that if you cannot share your business with me, you have no business with _him,"_ Helga the Horrible snapped. "Do I need to use smaller words?"

Few things offend my intelligence more deeply or readily than the assumption I don't _have_ any. I took in a deep breath of air, redolent of glass cleaner and artificial pine scent and that slightly dusty gestalt odor which always accumulates to a conglomeration of a lot of other people's old stuff.

"Ma'am," I drawled, preparing to _really_ lay into Helga—

"Jeffrey, is that _you?"_

The deep basso voice from the door separating the front of the store from the office space in the back sounded the way people expected Grim to upon first meeting: a little like a friendly, vocalizing earthquake. I raised a questioning eyebrow, the gesture only half-started when I found myself wrapped up in a rib-cracking embrace, courtesy of arms with the girth and power of alarmingly well-fed boa constrictors.

"My friend, it has been too long!" the earthquake whom I presumed to be Mr. Hagen rumbled, with a faint but unmistakable Scandinavian accent. "Please, excuse Dagmar. She is new in my employ, and I'm afraid I've not yet trained her to my expectations as thoroughly as I might wish."

"Uh," I croaked, trying to see past the red-shot blackness squeezing the edges of my sightline as that hug forced the air from my lungs. "Sure, no problem."

I tapped him on the shoulder once, lightly, and then again with a bit more urgency as a great cracked bell began to toll in my head, warning me night-night time was coming on _fast_ if I didn't get a breath in. The hug abruptly subsided, spilling me onto my feet and from there to the ground. Although the impact hurt, the sudden influx of blessed air into my throat and chest more than made up for any discomfort.

"Oh, dear, I _do_ apologize, Jeffrey," the earthquake said. I looked up at him—

_This_ was Jens Hagen, the owner of Andvaranaut?

He was on the little side, and this is coming from a guy whose height tops out at thoroughly average on the best of days. Maybe five feet tall, he looked like he hadn't been birthed, but forged in the sort of munitions factory which turns out giant cannons and steel golems. His biceps were as wide as my thigh, his chest stout and broad enough to double as a keg for gunpowder, and even though his legs were stubby, their musculature strained the seams of his prosaic khaki Dockers.

But the most startling thing about him was his color.

He was _black,_ and I don't mean African-American or even full-blown just off the plane from Zimbabwe or wherever. _His_ brand of black would make the darkness under mountains check under its bed and instantly incite the wrath of every white supremacist group on the planet. Beneath the office-casual drag of his khakis and a polo shirt the same color as Dagmar's, he looked a bit like Poe's Angel of the Odd, only sculpted in one complete piece out of something as smooth as obsidian and hard as titanium. The only relief from all that blackness came from twists and whorls of what looked for all the world like copper wire on the crown and temples of his head and covering his cheeks and chin.

And his glowing aquamarine eyes, which blazed out of his curiously aquiline, kindly face like searchlights rigged up by demons.

He held out a hand with graceful pianist's fingers which only reinforced the impression of his being cobbled together from spare parts. I took it and he hauled me to my feet with the finesse of a hydraulic winch.

"Are you quite all right?" he asked solicitously.

"Y-yeah. I'm fine, thanks. No worries." I forced a smile because I could feel the weight of Hagar the Hideous' gaze staring holes into my back.

"Come, my friend, come. There is still time. Would you care for some refreshment?"

I peered around the pawnshop, surprised at how freely he was speaking. My discomfiture amped up to eleven when I realized no one was moving besides Dagmar, him and me. They were all still standing around, staring blankly at whatever they'd been looking at previously, but now they were all doing bang-up impressions of statuary.

He chuckled as I turned a pointed look on him. "Illusions, 'Jeffrey,'" he chortled, giving my faux name a little extra emphasis. "No one wants to shop at a store where no one is, so I made myself some shoppers to make others feel at home."

I'm fuzzy on the concept of social proof and how it works in actual practice, but I had to admit he made a hell of a point. "Okay, great," I said. "So—where's this item I'm supposed to see?"

I had to ask myself what possible good I could do vetting an object owned by a guy with such obvious skill at illusion, but Hagen seemed to pick up on my thoughts immediately. "I've already discussed testing with the other party," he said, stroking his pot-scrubber of a beard in a way which signified he was referring to Grim. "You will have ample opportunity to verify its provenance to your content."

If the ring's provenance needed verification, exactly the wrong damned guy was standing in my size nine boots right now.

"The tests are very simple, you see," he said. "Let's go into the back. Dagmar, be a dear and keep an eye on the place while we're in the back?"

She grunted, apparently not deeming a more elaborate reply necessary. Hagen beckoned me toward a door marked Staff Only, which he opened and held for me.

If I hadn't been watching him as I passed, I'd never have known the door was warded. He drew some sort of glyph or rune, like a T with the crossbar bent downward on either side of the vertical stroke. The door flared with muted gold light which dissipated into little sparkles and motes of shimmer before disappearing into the air. A low, buzzing crackle filled the air along with the light, energy sparking over my skin. Whatever mojo Hagen had whipped up to guard that door, it popped up with a smoothness and subtlety which spoke loudly to Hagen's formidable magickal talent.

: _He's a dwarf_ , Svetalina said. : _A Svartalf, to be specific. They usually stay in Nidavellir, don't spend much time on this plane anymore. He must be on an errand of fantastic importance._

He turned to face me, his face wreathed in a cheerful grin. "The spirit is correct, Soulforger," he said with a slight bow, sending my eyebrows toward the ceiling again. Not many people can hear Svetalina the way I can, the same way not many people today have seen a live dodo. "Among regular humans I am known as Jens Hagen, purveyor of pawnshop crap and possessor of somewhat unfortunate genetics which just narrowly escape dwarfism. Among the Wise and my family, I am Fafnir Hreidmarsen, ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Nine Worlds and especially the magi of Midgard."

"'Plenipotentiary?'" I quoted. "Not familiar with that term."

"It means I speak with the full force and authority of Nidavellir, and what I say my people will honor and enforce."

I gulped. "Uh. So—you could declare war on us?"

He smiled, motioning me to follow him. "Not today, Soulforger. Grim is an old and esteemed colleague of mine, who sent his best and most powerful magus on this errand. It would be rude indeed to repay such hospitality on his part with martial declarations."

"Uh." _Best and most powerful? I need to find a way to have a quiet word with Grim's Rekkrs, see if he's started barking at the moon or forgetting where he was for extended periods of time._

"Quite so," Hagen/Hreidmarsen said. "I am named for an ancestor of mine whose reach exceeded his grasp." He stopped before another door of plain wood painted white and made a gesture. The door shivered, disappeared and revealed another in its place, this one beefy enough to do just about any bank vault proud, featuring a mechanical combination lock, an electronic passcode entry system and what looked for all the world like a handprint scanner. Pretty high-tech stuff for a pawnshop, but then, its owner was hardly what one would call normal either.

"Would you be so kind as to turn your back?" A ghostly cloud of embarrassment flickered over his stone-carved features. "I do hate to ask such a gauche question, but the beast of security must be fed."

I raised an eyebrow at that and hurried to turn around, hoping the beast bit wasn't literal. My Norse lore is rusty, to say the least, but I thought I remembered at least a couple of stories concerning fantastic treasure hordes and troves guarded by creatures nasty enough to send Cerberus yelping back home to mama. In fact, I vaguely remembered hearing a thing where Tolkien "borrowed" the concept of dragon-guarded treasure from the Norse, who got it from the guys who dreamed up, or reported on, the exploits of Beowulf. And wasn't there a thing about a ring?

Another flash of light lit the hall and Hagen chuckled. "It is safe, Mr. Campbell."

I turned to see that the now-open door looked into a room entirely encased in some kind of steely-looking metal, with rivets tightly placed down the join of each set of panels at roughly six-foot intervals. Overhead, a series of serious-looking industrial vents pierced the wall about seven feet off the floor. The room itself was completely bare, save for a metal lockbox the size of a rolling suitcase, resting in a clear plastic case on a polished metal plinth.

"First, let's show you the replication," he said, stepping aside so I could enter. Once again he made a sign on the door panel as it closed, this one nothing I could readily recognize, and a vaguely pearlescent sheen danced over the metal and vanished. Satisfied, he moved over to the north side of the plinth and opened the box with one hand as he waved me over to join him with the other.

The open lid revealed a midnight blue velvet field upon which reclined a chunky, thick, plain band of some sort of yellow metal. The band, actually more of a bracelet than a ring meant for someone's fingers based on its size, glinted palely in the fluorescent glare from overhead. It looked like gold to me. If I was right, the median salary for the Portland metro area probably rested in that case.

"Okay," I said, after a minute of watching the ring just sitting there, being a ring. "Do we need to do the hokey-pokey or turn ourselves around, so it won't be shy about doing its business?"

My dwarfish companion laughed with genuine, friendly amusement. "Hardly, Mr. Campbell. It simply hasn't quite come the hour yet. We are fortune. You got here early."

For the next twenty minutes or so, he demonstrated himself to be a veritable font of information regarding Andvaranaut and Norse legend in general, as well as a hell of a fun storyteller. He regaled me with anecdotes concerning his famous forebear and namesake Fafnir, who had been dwarf royalty before he decided he deserved Andvaranaut and connived to murder his father, King Hreidmar, to get it, changing himself into a dragon afterward to more ably protect his booty.

"As in 'treasure,' not 'his ass,'" he snickered, "although I daresay he feared for the latter almost as much as the former. The murder of any family member, especially one's mother or father, was deemed to be a particularly heinous crime, and it was a very rare individual who could garner sympathy from the law for it. Much like today, I should imagine."

I laughed as well at the first part and got very thoughtful at the second. Anyone badass enough to transform into a full-on, honest-to-evilness fire-breathing dragon was several levels up the power ladder from anything with which _I_ ever cared to cross paths.

"If you're wondering, I'm not like the original Fafnir," he said, with an expression I'm sure he intended to be reassuring. "I want this thing as far away from me and under as many protections as humanly possible." A shiver rippled up his whole body from toes to eyebrows. "I don't need or want this sort of madness in my world."

"Okay, so what hap—"

Under the pitiless glow of the fluorescents, the ring shivered in its velvet bed. I startled, wondering if Hagen had kicked or knocked the plinth.

"Did you s—"

Runes appeared along the ring's outer perimeter, rising quickly from ghostly orange hints to blazing red markings so bright they flung their images against the metal wall like the reflections from a disco ball commissioned for a dance party in Hell. The ring shivered again, harder, blurring in my vision. I blinked to clear my eyes, and just that quickly there were eight perfect copies of the first ring, forming the points of a compass rose with the original at the center. The runes on the replicas glowed with the same hellish fervor as the original too, and I gulped as the markings faded away again.

Nine rings which could seek, and deliver, treasure and ruin.

"That was the first test," Fafnir/Jens said briskly, as if this was common, everyday stuff. Maybe to him, it was. "The second test is to prove it can actually find gold."

"Uh. How do you—"

He checked his surprisingly ordinary smart watch, then smiled and held up a hand. "Hold on a moment."

One second later a knock like a SWAT team battering at the door sounded through the room, echoing off the metal walls as if I'd accidentally found my way into a giant's kettle drum.

The ring rose up of its own accord and slammed itself against the clear wall of its plastic prison, then again. White dents appeared, marring the clear plastic with each impact, and the plastic tolled with a surprisingly sweet musical tone.

"Dagmar is outside," Fafnir explained. "I asked her to bring a gold object to the door."

Inside the box, the ring continued to batter at the wall, oriented precisely on the chamber's door. Fafnir knocked twice and, after a moment, the ring began to track along the box, following what I presumed to be Dagmar's movements with the gold, knocking against the plastic until it reached the corner. It rammed the corner a few times and then floated back into the middle of the rings it had spawned, laying itself down precisely in their center.

"Do I even _want_ to know what the third test is?" I gave him a narrow look.

"The third test involves you touching its aura," he said. "Grim said you have a talent for detecting temporal magick."

True, in point of fact. I'd been gifted an artifact from Svetalina through an intermediary after her death, and had recognized the jagged, tingling pulse of time magick almost immediately. While I don't trust that brand of magick, and certainly don't have the aptitude for it which a full-fledged Tempus would have, I knew enough about it to recognize it when I see it. Kind of like that Supreme Court justice and obscenity, only, you know, minus the _obscenity._

"Do I need to touch the ring directly?" I'd more readily have petted a shark than touched that ring or any of its descendants with my bare hands. Being a Soulforger was curse enough without adding whatever bad juju a mythic Norse artifact might pack onto my ledger.

"No," he said, and I detected a flicker of sympathy on his face as he read my fear and correctly assessed from whence it sprang. "Simply holding your hand over the case should be sufficient."

"Good," I said. "Okay, let's do it."

Extending my hand, I stepped toward the case until my palm faced down directly over Andvaranaut. Nothing happened, and I lowered it an inch.

Two inches.

Three.

Four.

And recoiled with a startled oath from the sudden, sharp snap of contact, like getting my skin popped with a supersized rubber band a dozen times in a matter of one second. There was time magick, sure, but a couple of other elements seethed and curled around the edges of it. Necro, definitely—blood and death magick worked really well for a lot of nasty things, including curses which could apparently power themselves indefinitely, given a steady flow of possession into the greedy grasps of suitably manageable suckers.

But what was that other magick? It was so faint under the other two that I couldn't get a good bead on it, but something told me the time and death magick were sideshows and that other element was the one which held them all together.

Grimacing, I shook out my hand. "Well, I'm convinced. It does seem to be the authentic article."

"I expected no less," Fafnir said. "Let me box that up for you and get you on your way. I'd prefer it be behind the Motherhouse's wards before nightfall."

"There some reason for that?"

"No, no," he said a little too quickly, fiddling with the plastic case a little too intently for his assurance to feel entirely genuine. "I just—I've had this ring for a long time, and I don't want to carry the burden anymore. Let adultier adults deal with it, as the kids say."

"Right," I answered slowly. "Okay, then."

"It would be best if you don't touch it any further," he said. "I'll carry the case out to your car and put it in the backseat for you under a glamour, so no one sees."

That made a hard kind of sense. If Fafnir had someone gunning to get their greasy meat hooks on Andvaranaut, the best way to make sure it didn't fall into their hands was to get it gone, pronto. And seriously, who the hell would look for a legendary cursed armband in the environs of Portland, Oregon? Especially if it was being chauffeured around by a guy driving a compact hybrid? The bad guys would be so busy laughing themselves sick over it, they'd completely miss their chance to swipe it.

For the first time since I'd pulled out of the Motherhouse's garage, I felt a grudging ripple of something akin to admiration for Grim's choice of camouflage. No matter how much I wished I'd been given an armored car, or prayed no one I knew saw me behind the wheel of that ridiculous little vehicle, I'd stand a much better chance of getting the ring back to the Motherhouse safely if I was driving an inconspicuous ride.

"Sounds good." I held out my hand, and Fafnir took my forearm in one of those old-world handshakes which is supposed to indicate you have peaceful intentions and aren't carrying a dagger up your sleeve or some such, leaving me no choice but to follow suit. The muscles of his lower arm bunched beneath my fingers like bridge cables under tension, but to my surprise the hard-looking surface overlaying them felt exactly like human skin, warm, soft and pliant.

"Hopefully we will meet again under less fraught circumstances, my friend," Fafnir said, opening the door. "Perhaps Grim and I can tell you more about Andvaranaut and our history, because you listened so courteously."

"I'd like that," I said, slightly surprised to realize I actually meant it.

He led me through the store and out into the late afternoon daylight, trotting over to the Motherhouse's hybrid unerringly. Granted, there were only a couple of cars in the lot and the hybrid was closest to the pawnshop's door, but still, the ease with which he sussed out my ride surprised me. He placed the metal case in the backseat, closed the door and stood up with a flourish.

"Please get it back to the Motherhouse safely," he said gravely, offering me one of those courtly little Old World bows which speaks of a level of breeding and restrained taste maybe one in a hundred million Americans actually possesses, as opposed to aping. In return I offered him my best ceremonial bob of the head. From the outside I probably looked like a five-year-old with an overactive thyroid trying to impersonate a Japanese businessman and failing abysmally, but it's the thought that counts, right?

A string of something wet and warm slapped against the left side of my face, soaking into my white tee from the join of my neck and shoulder halfway down my shoulder blade. While I was preoccupied wondering who the hell was throwing water balloons, something about the size of a soccer ball, with an odd, rough texture bounced off the side of my face, ricocheted off my shoulder and hit the ground with a meaty thud which made my stomach writhe.

Fafnir's blank, dull blue eyes stared up at me, six inches from my left foot. Over his eyes, his eyebrows were frozen at the top of his sizeable forehead in an expression of unfathomable shock, and his jaw gaped open, his tongue lolling out as if sampling the flavor of the asphalt.

Shocked, I tracked down the lines of his body to their terminus, finding them significantly faster than I expected. Beneath his chin, everything which should have been there was just _gone,_ leaving only a raggedly sheared off stump of upper neck which exposed the inner workings of a humanish body to the open air in a hideously callous manner. More of that tarry substance oozed sluggishly onto the asphalt, and dimly, I noticed the sharp, sweet scent of cinnamon.

Somewhere, a careless lackey dumped an unthinkably huge vat of some sticky substance into the gears of time. The world shivered to a stop. Rebeling against the temporal freeze, my brain kicked into maximum revs.

By reflex, my right hand Reached, punching through the veil separating our mundane, physical reality from the backstage area which supports the totality of existence. The barrier separated before my fingers like chilly, oily plastic wrap, and something smooth, cold and hard nudged at my skin. I slipped my fingers around it and set my grip firmly, drawing it forth into reality to throw back the golden sunlight.

The sword had been forged with the heavy back spine and forward-bent blade profile of a kukri, coupled with the lean, sweeping lines of a Greek _kopis._ Beneath the blade, a pair of razor-sharp quillions curved upward from either side of the grip, which had been enclosed with a knuckleduster surmounted with a keen, thin cutting edge. At the pommel, the hilt fell away to a cone-shaped skull cracker which tapered to a sharp point.

_This_ was the intended result of the Soulforger's deadly craft. A cold, wolfish smile tugged at the corners of my lips as the flare of reflected light heralded the weapon's incursion into the physical world, gleaming right into the too-wide eyes of—

Huh. I'd never had someone from the DMV pay me a personal visit before.

She—it—the creature was busily shattering the safety glass of my ride on the side closest to the case.

One step forward brought me within striking distance, and I moved synapses around to let Svetalina see through my eyes and control my limbs. Playing sock puppet to Svetalina's puppet master isn't easy or comfortable for me, but my inner control freak copes with the necessity by adopting the very pragmatic view that discomfort beats the hell out of death. The sword flicked down, seeming to move too slowly and lightly to do any damage to the whatsit, but something hit the ground with an ugly _thwock_ and she screamed, clutching at the severed stump of her forearm with her remaining claw.

"I'll kill you for that, Soulforger!"

"I didn't know the DMV made house calls," I retorted, falling back to a middle guard position with my back foot rigid, balancing on the ball of my forward foot, sword raised slightly.

"I told you that you wouldn't keep what you seek, Soulforger," the cacodemon hissed. Ropes of purplish blood leaked from between her claws.

"You don't have it yet, Stumpy," I reminded her.

In response, she reached in with her good hand and snatched up the case. Her wings spread wide, large enough to support a small airplane, and beat once. Hot air blasted me, plucking me off my feet as if I weighed no more than a pinch of dandelion fluff, tossing me ass over teakettle against the hood of the car with an ugly rattling thump.

I hit hard, the back of my head and the middle of my spine catching the metal and fiberglass with a groan of ripping car skin, a blast of white light shot with red and the tolling of a cracked bell behind my eyes. The pain stole my breath and wrung my stomach like a wet sponge. Setting my jaw, I tried to keep the last meal I'd eaten where I'd put it, willing my eyes to focus so I could gauge just how close I was to getting my face eaten.

Instead of lunging toward me, she leapt into the air, powered by those immense wings, flapping west toward Portland.

"Svetalina," I ordered, relaxing my grip on the sword, "after her!"

The blade dropped out of my line of sight and then reappeared, soaring up and away after the cacodemon, her blade glinting menacingly. I followed them with my eyes as I set about disengaging myself from the hood of the car.

Which worked fine for about two seconds, until I misjudged my next move and face-planted onto the pavement.

"Ow," I muttered, looking around with mingled relief and chagrin to find no one had seen my ever so graceful dismount. With a final quick glance down at Fafnir's bifurcated corpse, I scrambled into the car and fired it up.

" _Please fasten seat belt,_ " the car said.

"Nope," I snapped, throwing the car into reverse—

Nothing happened.

"Argh!" I screamed, buckling up and mashing the gas. This time the car responded, and I focused on pulling out of the parking lot as fast as I dared without risking a collision. All the while, I tried to keep the dwindling twinkle of Svetalina's blade in sight, but she was getting further away and I'd lose her in a few more seconds.

"Svetalina, eyes," I said, trusting that our metaphysical connection would allow her to hear.

Reality rippled, wavered and took on a reddish tinge in my field of view, forcing me to clench my teeth hard against a swell of nausea and stabbing pain akin to an ice cream headache turned up to twelve. To my relief, I could now follow Svetalina's etheric trail, scribed on the air in a straight line of violet. Even better, I could also track the larger, curved path of the cacodemon and her prize, which flared a toxic green.

"It'd be great to have some music for a chase scene," I grated out through gritted teeth, cutting the wheel sharply to the left to pick up the I-84, to a chorus of horns and a smattering of curses I couldn't quite make out.

"Now playing _The Four Seasons_ by Vivaldi," the car assured me, over the allegro first movement of the "Spring concerti."

"Wait—what?" If ever I'd needed further proof that the universe has a malicious sense of humor where I'm concerned, the past three minutes had thoroughly delivered.

: _David, she's fast_ , Svetalina said. If she'd still had teeth, she'd be gritting them. : _I don't know how much longer I can keep this up._

"What do you suggest?"

: _You're not going to like it._

"I'm thinking about making that the title of my autobiography," I retorted. "Gimme."

: _Pull over to the side of the road and feed me energy._

"Uh. What?" I blinked.

: _I'll explain later, just do it!_

"Okay—" I navigated past the onramp at Exit 13 for 181st Avenue, hit my hazards and made my way to the right side of the road, amid a further storm of honking. A woman in a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle I hadn't realized was there blistered past me, laying on her horn and waving cheerfully. I suppose it's _maybe_ hypothetically possible she could have been flipping me off, but one tries to look on the bright side.

Closing my eyes, I pushed magickal energy along the channel between myself and the spirit of the sword, trying to ignore the building drama of the Summer concerti from the car's speakers. Stuttering fits and starts crested into a wave wave as the power flowed into the channel and then settled into a smooth flow whose force increased by the moment.

"What are we doing, Svetalina?"

A rising electric tingle played over my skin, followed an instant later by a sudden rushing sensation which left me feeling hollowed-out, lightheaded and hungry enough to eat an entire cow, hooves, horns and all. And I saw why Svetalina hadn't bothered to answer me.

Most people only ever see lightning in the context of storms and dark clouds, which give the electrical discharge a nice, dramatic backdrop against which to strut its stuff. But when it's competing with a blazing sun and clear skies, lightning looks completely different, a forking pulse of energy marring the day. With eyes augmented by Svetalina's spirit sight, I watched as the bolt tracked through maybe a tenth of a mile of empty air and slammed into a freakishly shaped dark dot. The thing lost altitude and even from this distance I thought I heard a harpy's shriek of enraged pain.

Another sucking draw of magickal power folded my insides up like origami, and the sword emitted another burst of lightning. This time, something small tumbled away from the bat-winged outline of the cacodemon, and Svetalina surged forward.

: _Got it,_ she said smugly. : _I'm on my way back to you._

"Might want to hurry," I replied as the cacodemon wheeled on an updraft and turned toward Svetalina.

: _Do you think I upset her?_

"Uh. Yeah, Svetalina," I gulped. My voice came out high enough to remind me of puberty. "I think you upset her a whole lot."

: _Tsk, tsk_ , she replied, sounding more like a housewife miffed about forgetting to pick up milk than a deadly weapon being chased by an only slightly less deadly demon.

The cacodemon's leathern wings beat the air as Svetalina resolved in my gaze from the lead point of a magickal contrail to a glint of steel, just far enough north of the sun's direct path for me to make the sword's form out without needing to look directly into the nuclear fireball which keeps our planet alive. Svetalina must have been hauling nine kinds of ass, because the sword quickly grew until I could make out its curves and the various blades, edges and points I'd forged into the weapon. Hooked over the spine of the blade was the handle of the steel box containing Andvaranaut, low down toward the hilt, and I narrowly stopped myself from pumping my fist in a victory dance. Spattered with dwarf blood as I was, and given I was about to be in possession of a sword which would certainly attract more than its share of attention all on its own, I didn't need to top it all off by making a public spectacle of my lamentably Caucasian dancing ability.

: _David, I'm going to fly into your hand and I need you to put me and the box Between immediately._

"Check." I didn't need a manual or mission statement to understand what she was thinking. If I pushed the sword and the box into the little pocket dimension I'd created to store Svetalina's blade during those times when I didn't really need a letter, a beer bottle or an implement of mass attitude adjustment ready to hand, the cacodemon couldn't get at Andvaranaut without my cooperation. Which I had no intention of giving. It was a thin reed upon which to hang my ongoing safety and the continued structural integrity of my spinal column, but the earth under my boots wasn't exactly cracking under the strain of supporting the plethora of more attractive options I had at my disposal.

: _Here I come—_

She dove from the sky, heeled up and over, and the hilt smacked into my raised hand with the bladed knuckleduster facing outward. My fingers curled around the textured metal of the grip, threading through the holes in the knuckleduster, just in time for the cacodemon to drop out of the air with a scream, diving toward me like a kamikaze bomber.

I fell back and punched upward. The cacodemon gave an earsplitting scream of fury and rose upward, spattering gobbets of purplish blood all over me. Oblivious to the drama playing out just feet away, traffic kept buzzing by at highway speed, adding to the multiplicity of dangers inherent in the battle.

: _She must be veiling us_ , Svetalina mused, an observation I found acutely worrisome not least because of the hellish amount of magickal juice it suggested the cacodemon possessed. Veils aren't easy magick at the best of times for skilled operators, with iffy results ranging from the same kind of boring blandness I manage just by breathing to parallax-adjusted invisibility which the Predator would execute its R&D team to replicate. If the demon was veiling us from a distance while doing her best impression of a Harrier jet, she had to have power in spades.

The tainted metal soaked up the purple stains like water into parched sand, a hideous reminder that the sword wasn't powered by magick alone. : _Ugh. Demon blood. I'd much rather have vodka._

"If we live through this, I'll get you a bottle of Absolut."

: _Beluga, if you please._

"Uh. I don't think my budget will cover caviar—" I raised the sword just in time to parry a swipe of the cacodemon's talons. "—Even if you could eat it," I finished, panting.

: _No, David, it's a vodka brand from Siberia. And—_ look out!

I spun to one side, narrowly avoiding being split from stem to sternum by an upward rake. For someone who'd lost a hand in particularly epic fashion not long before, she had a lot more fight than I cared to deal with. Which meant I needed a game changer, fast.

The cacodemon dove toward me again, only to slam into the surface of the driver's side door as I interposed it between us like the world's most cut-rate shield. Her talons carved through the steel of the door and caught me a glancing slice across my side. I grunted and tumbled into the driver's seat, tugging the door closed behind me with a hiss of pain as the ragged slashes the demon had caused just above my belt began to sting and burn in earnest.

I pressed the ignition button, put the car in drive and stomped the gas.

" _Please fasten seat belt,"_ the car reminded me pleasantly, apparently heedless of the life or death nature of the situation.

"Mother _fucker!"_ I screamed at the car, clawing at the seatbelt. "I swear the first thing I'm going to do when I get back to the Motherhouse is cut you into fucking _confetti!"_ The latch clicked into place and I pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The car scuttled forward just in time for the demon's claws to erupt through the rear driver's side window at exactly the right level to take my head clean off. Another half-second where I'd been and I would have been dead, and my gut and points south clenched tightly closed in appreciation of my luck and the closeness of the call. I screamed terrified defiance as I stood on the gas, urging the car on with everything I had.

In the rearview mirror, the cacodemon raised its head in a screeching rage and launched itself into the air, dwindling rapidly as the car's motor whined, then grumbled as it switched from electric to gas, gaining speed with awful, dreamlike lethargy—

And the needle stopped climbing at sixty miles per hour.

"Why aren't we accelerating?" I asked empty air.

" _This vehicle is governed to comply with state speed limits and maximum fuel efficiency recommendations,"_ the car responded.

"What the fuck does _that_ mean?" I snapped.

" _This vehicle cannot go over sixty miles per hour,_ " the car translated, as if this was somehow a good thing.

"Well, _un_ govern it! We need speed and we need it _now,_ Hal!"

" _This vehicle is governed to comply with state speed limits—"_

" _Oh, shut up!"_ I growled.

The car's AI fell blessedly silent.

I checked my rearview and saw no indication that the cacodemon was behind me. Gradually, by painful inches, my bits and bobs began to relax and unclench as the adrenaline subsided from my system, leaving me shaky, weak-kneed, scared and hurting. I spent a few minutes nursing dark thoughts about modern engineering and safety features which had almost gotten me killed; hybrid cars in general; my Sage, whom I was fairly confident I'd be punching in the face again at the soonest possible opportunity; and the cacodemon, who was on my shitlist for any number of reasons at the moment, not least of which was trying to kill me over this trinket.

: _Now would be a good time to put me back Between, David_ , Svetalina prompted.

"Oh. Urgh. Yeah. Right," I said, picking up the sword and pushing it and the box Between. I put both hand on the wheel and fought the urge to rest my forehead there as well. "So—what happens next?"

: _You may want to call Grim._

"Yeah," I said sarcastically. "Yeah, _that's_ a conversation I want to have right now. Let's _totally_ call Grim."

" _Calling Grim._ "

"Wait—what? _No—!"_

The phone burred twice, and then: "Mr. Campbell," Grim said over the speakers. "How is your errand coming?"

I laid the situation out for him tersely, in as few sentences as possible, omitting my absolute hatred of his choice of errand cars for the moment. We could have that discussion once more immediate matters had been dealt with. He paused for so long I thought the call had dropped before he said, "And Dagmar did not intervene?"

"Who?"

"His assistant."

"No. She didn't," I said. "Isn't that odd?"

"Not necessarily," Grim replied. "I have a suspicion she was tasked with guarding the rest of Fafnir's treasures. If that was the case, she would not leave the store even if it meant his death."

"What could she possibly be guarding that was more important than his life?" I asked.

"You don't want to know," Grim said, his voice dropping through octaves like a verbal boulder down a mountain. _"I_ don't even want to know, but I may need to find out. I trust you escaped the cacodemon?"

"For now," I said. "I'm just passing the 205 South ramp, but traffic's starting to get snarled up. I'm hoping there's enough witnesses she'll break off long enough so I can make it back to the Motherhouse."

"Keep your wits about you, David." He paused again. "You have done well. I had no idea there were so many external interests seeking your prize. I will send a Rekkr detail to rendezvous with you at the Fremont Bridge. They will fall in around you. Don't bother looking, you won't see them, but they will know to look for you and be prepared for trouble."

Somehow, the reassurance that the cavalry was on the way both made me feel better and stole what little starch I still had left in my knees and spine. I hoped it didn't show in my voice. Grim and I aren't exactly enemies, but I don't trust him not to exploit a perceived weakness if he deems it necessary. "Good to know."

"For my own edification, where exactly is the item?"

"I put it Between for safekeeping."

A longish pause. Someone with slightly less brass and a better-honed survival instinct than I might have developed a most annoying itch betwixt the shoulder blades. Sure glad I'm not that guy. Then Grim took a deep breath. "I—would prefer it was a little more accessible, just in case."

I scowled. "Well, here's the beauty of it. If I buck the kicket, _no one_ will have it. _Ever._ Doesn't get much safer than that, right?"

"Buck. The. Kicket?"

"You know," I said brightly, in an effort to be as irritating as I possibly could. "Die? Croak? Snuff it? Bite the big one? Get fitted for a halo and harp? Kick the bucket? Raise my voice with the choir eternal—?"

"Yes, thank you, David, I _am_ in fact familiar with the concept of death, although I still don't understand the point of mixing up your syllables," Grim broke in impatiently. Some people, yeesh. No sensayuma, as Ian Fleming wrote. "But if anything happens to you—"

"Then no one gets the goodies and there's no point worrying about it. On the upside, this means both you and the demon bitch are well-motivated to ensure my ongoing good health. If I make it to the Motherhouse, she can try for the ring another time and you get what you want. Everyone wins except the demon bitch, short term. Plus, you get all the obvious added benefits of having me alive."

"And what benefits would those be, exactly, Mr. Campbell?"

"How about the ones where you get magickal muscle to run sooper-sekrit missions for you, risking said muscle's neck in the process?"

"It's not as though you're not being well-compensated, David."

"I don't recall funeral expenses being included in our negotiations, Grim. And right about now seems like a swell time to correct that oversight. I always wanted one of those really big, elaborate mausoleums. You know, the ones that look like Greek temples or Egyptian obelisks—"

"I assure you," Grim said in tones cool and dry enough to mummify, "that if you die on the job you will receive funerary honors commensurate with your service. In this moment, I envision an ashcan on my desk. Do I make myself plain?"

The spectral image of Grim puffing on a Cohiba, occasionally tapping the burnt end over a tin which didn't _only_ contain tobacco dandruff, rose up behind my eyes with enough force to make buttoning my lip seem like the best idea I'd had all day.

"All right," I said, pulling to a stop behind a tan Nissan whose rear bumper consisted almost entirely of stickers riffing on the theme of "Fuck" in various fonts, conjugations and combinations. "I'm officially stuck." Fiddling with controls on the dashboard screen brought up a map with the Motherhouse conveniently highlighted as the destination in yellow, while my location showed as a red icon which split the difference designwise between a pushpin and a carat. "According to the car, I'm forty-five minutes out from the Motherhouse and about ten from the beginning of the Fremont Bridge." Actually, forty-three and small change, but why quibble over inconsequentials?

Grim grunted. "The Rekkrs should be in position and waiting for you. Do try not to make Portland rush hour any more tedious than it must be, Mr. Campbell."

" _Call disconnected,_ " the car said.

For want of a more visually appealing target, I gave the instrument panel my best glower. "Thank you ever so much for calling my employer. Tattletale."

: _In all fairness to the car_ , Svetalina piped up, sounding as if she was smothering laughter with a significant effort of will, : _without that call, Grim wouldn't have known to deploy the Rekkrs to help ensure your safe return. Maybe you could be a_ little _nicer._

"And maybe pigs will dance the Macarena," I retorted, "but come _on_. How likely even _is_ that?"

: _If I were still corporeal, I might have a quiet word with the Motherhouse's R &D staff and find out just_ how _likely it could be._

I goosed the car forward just enough to be able to say I had before the gridlock caught me once more. Raising one hand to stroke down my face, I set the other to tapping out a complex, syncopated beat on the steering wheel for no particular reason but my own entertainment. "You really take all the fun out of being a smartass sometimes, Svetalina. You know that?"

: _It could be worse_ , Svetalina said. : _You might want to look around._

"Why?"

: _Just do it. I need to see._

"Ngh," I muttered, moving things around in my head, my vision going red and my eyes feeling unaccountably full as Svetalina shared the view.

: _Turn around!_

Reacting to the alarm in Svetalina's voice, I did as she bade, just in time to see something dark and oddly misshapen drop from the air toward my rear bumper.

"Got any great ideas, Svetalina?" I muttered.

: _Grab the sword. Leave the box. You don't need the handicap._

I Reached for the second time in a half-hour and drew the sword into reality. It came to my hand in perfect silence, with no fanfare, birthing itself into the material world without so much as a whisper. I caught the box and pushed on it, holding the container where it was as the sword's downward-raked tip cleared the veil between Between and what we call the real world.

The cacodemon descended onto the rear bumper of the hybrid with a commingled scream of incensed pain and a groaning bellow of ripping metal. A shower of sparks flew up from the back, not the warm red-orange starbursts of superheated metal, but the cooler bluish-purple arcs of electricity as the critical conduits and arteries which allowed the car to run shredded and fell apart under the cacodemon's talons. The engine shuddered, sputtered and died.

More alarming still, the rich, sharp smell of gasoline vapor blossomed.

"Shit!" I clawed at the seatbelt latch until it popped loose and threw my door open, banging it sharply into the side of a shocking pink Toyota pickup. The woman in the driver's seat goggled at me from beneath treatment-fried fake blonde hair, her jowly face reddening with anger.

"It's gonna blow!" I screamed, gesticulating in a way I hoped conveyed an imminent explosion, but which I suspected just looked like a boringly ordinary guy having a seizure while waving around a sword which could have come out of a Boris Vallejo painting on a Portland freeway. She blanched and then seemed to dismiss my antics as unworthy of notice.

Just another Tuesday, nothing to see here, folks. Keep Portland weird and all that.

A black SUV bearing the livery and lightbars of the Portland Police hit its siren, making it whoop and then die.

" _Return to your vehicle, driver!"_ a male voice boomed over the car's speaker system.

"It's gonna blow!" I repeated the dance of death I'd performed for the other driver's benefit, this time facing back the way I'd come. Behind the windshield, the cop seemed to zero in on the sword in my hand, and now his door opened. He crouched behind it, aiming one of those ugly, boxy handguns at me from maybe fifty feet away.

"Drop the sword and get on the ground!" he shouted. Without the boost of the car's sound system, he sounded very young and uncertain, but a Glock pointed in one's direction tends to lend the wielder gravitas, whether they have it naturally or not.

I ducked behind the front of the crippled hybrid and knelt, panting in the hot asphalt/concrete/plastic/metal/chemical scent of the freeway, mingling with the cool, wet, dead-fish-and-decaying-vegetable-matter smell of the river in a lung-choking mélange. The odor of gasoline swelled, and I staggered away from the car, keeping low, moving in an awkward scuttling gait like a crab trying to impersonate a duck.

From immediately behind me a whooshing _crump_ split the air, shockingly loud. Pieces of fiberglass and metal rained down around me, and I felt a few bits of debris slam into my arms and back. Apparently startled into reaction by the explosion, the officer's gun barked twice in flat, echoing reports. The humid air twisted the gunshots into the concatenations of cherry bombs exploding in an aluminum garbage can.

I glanced up to where the cacodemon soared, invisible to ordinary senses, a purple-green smudge in my crimson-tinted vision, as pandemonium erupted on the traffic-throttled bridge. A flood of people of all shapes, sizes and colors appeared out of nowhere, fleeing in panic from the burning hulk of my erstwhile carriage and the gunshots in single-minded terror which looked the same no matter the age, gender, occupation or socioeconomic stratum of the individual face.

You would think there'd be no possible way a moment like this could get _worse_ , right? I thought so too.

And it turns out I was wrong.

Because just then, a traffic helicopter heeled up overhead and began to descend. From the open door, a woman with a video camera leaned out to the limit of the straps which prevented her from falling, getting a dandy view of the chaos on the bridge for the benefit of the folks at home. Even better, she swept the camera in my direction and froze, and my gut dropped to my ankles in intense chagrin as I realized I had just become the reluctant star of _the_ hot news story of the day in PDX.

I turned and joined the tide of terrified humanity, keeping my head down and the sword as low to my side as I could manage in a bid to blend in with the crowd, my breath coming in sharps puffs and wheezes of exertion. I'm not in bad shape as such things go, but I'm certainly no Ironman contestant and if you ever see me in a marathon, you can safely bet your house I wandered onto the running route by mistake.

That said, adrenaline is a wonderful chemical for those times when ass needs to be hauled by those who _don't_ haul ass if they can avoid it.

A little boy in coveralls emblazoned with a whimsically smiling train engine on the bib piped up, "Mommy! Look at that cool sword!"

And the hits just keep on comin'...

"Mommy," a handsome woman who reminded me of the actress who played Anita Van Buren on _Law and Order_ , slanted a glance at her progeny, then followed his pudgy finger to where he was pointing, still jabbering away about my cool sword. Her eyelids popped wide, revealing white all around, and she opened her mouth to scream. I shook my head urgently.

"I'm on your side," I said as quietly as I could and still be heard over the melee. "But if you scream, I'm screwed." I pointed upward toward where the cacodemon hovered, less than a hundred feet below and to the left of the helicopter.

Impossibly, her eyes widened _more,_ and I knew she had enough magick, or at least sufficiently formidable mental talents, to pierce the cacodemon's veil and see her for what she was _._

"Th-th-that thing is after you?" she quavered.

"Yes," I said, relieved that someone in this crowd had the presence of mind to ask questions instead of simply reacting mindlessly. "I'm trying to stop her, but I can't do that if I'm trying to dodge the news cameras, the cops _and_ private citizens."

She nodded. "What can I do?"

"Get yourself and your son to safety," I said. "If anyone asks, you never saw me and I was never here, okay?"

She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together, nodding slowly and then with a bit more certainty as she made a snap decision in my favor. "Okay."

I gave the kid the friendliest smile I could muster under the circumstances, which resembled the rictus of an electrocution victim more than a proper grin. Oblivious, he shot a gap-toothed grin right back at me and then hustled away in his mother's no-nonsense grip. With a quick glance around, I followed them across the steel boundary of the expansion joint which demarcated the beginning of the bridge proper.

Something hit me in the small of the back with sledgehammer force, pitching me forward onto the asphalt and ringing my chimes thoroughly. My empty hand, both knees and my left cheek began to sting and burn from road rash.

Then I felt myself rising off the asphalt into the air, dangling like a hooked salmon by my left shoulder from a hand whose barbed talons sunk deep into my flesh. The bridge dropped away as I rose, making my stomach twist like an overwrung sponge.

"The ring, Soulforger," the cacodemon demanded, her voice seething with implacable wrath and an excitement so acute it was nearly orgasmic. "Give it to me or die."

The Golden Gate Bridge is often held up as the _non plus ultra_ of American bridges. It's one of the most recognizable landmarks and popular suicide destinations in the country, and very few people who take that jump live to tell about the experience. At two hundred twenty feet above the San Francisco Bay, a leap from the bridge into the water below is more or less the same as faceplanting on concrete.

But the Fremont Bridge which makes up a goodly stretch of I-405 is one hundred sixty-one feet taller than the Golden Gate Bridge—and right now, I dangled in midair most of a hundred feet above _that_.

I looked down to see nothing but a whole lot of air between me and the surface of the Willamette River. My stomach writhed and tried to climb up my throat, and my _everything_ curled up and cringed away from the emptiness beneath my boots. Tumbling from this height would allow those tasked with recovering my smushed body to bury what was left of my corpse in a jelly jar.

"Fuck you!" I screamed, voice high as a Vienna Boys' Choir alto with terror. "If I die, you'll never get the ring!"

"True," the demon mused. "On the other hand, you won't be around to be a thorn in my side."

"There is that," I admitted. "But I'm not giving you the ring where you can just kill me anyway, and there's really no upside for you in killing the only person who can get you the ring other than a sense of personal satisfaction."

While I bantered with my would-be executioner, some part of my mind whirred up to redline RPM, seeking a way out of this mess which resulted in a living, breathing Soulforger at the end of it.

Svetalina's sword could fly, but she couldn't do that and support my weight too. Something to do with the mass disparity between six pounds of metal and most of two hundred pounds of human flesh and bone, to say nothing of the metaphysical differential between a corporeal entity and a being of pure spirit. Which meant there was no way for me to magic-feather my way down using the sword.

Between wasn't an option. No one in living memory had ever traveled Between and survived, and the miniscule number who had managed it throughout history reported hungry, cruising horrors which make sharks look like goldfish. Conventional wisdom held that even trying it was tantamount to putting a fully loaded revolver in my mouth and pulling the trigger.

Jumping was out for all the reasons I'd already enumerated, although the ongoing pain and strain of the cacodemon's talons and the tearing damage they were wreaking on structurally important internal bits of me forced me to consider the idea that at least if I jumped, the end would be quick and relatively painless by comparison. I think.

Which meant by far the best option was to keep her talking.

"If you set me down, I'll give you the original," I promised, mentally crossing my fingers. Lying to supernal and infernal beings is usually held to be an unwise practice among those who deal with such things, generally because they prefer to keep their bodies functional and their souls comfortably ensconced in said bodies. Still, I figured I could rattle things around in the box and have an eight-in-nine chance of slipping her a duplicate rather than the real McCoy.

"And how do I know you'll give me the original and not a copy?" the demon purred.

"Because there's no point in me lying to you," I said. "You'll be able to feel which one is the real one as soon as I put it in your hand."

"That may be, Soulforger," the demon said, "but I don't trust you not to weasel out of it. Whereas if I keep you here, you'll give me the ring soon enough just so I'll stop hurting you." She sunk her talons a little deeper and shook me for emphasis, shivering waves of agony through my body until I had no breath in my lungs and black waves rolled and roiled before my eyes.

: _David, stab her._

"What?"

: _I said_ stab her _. I have a plan._

"I said, you'll give me the ring right here," the cacodemon hissed, not realizing I wasn't actually speaking to her.

"Svetalina, I hope to hell you know what you're doing," I said, slashing upward with every ounce of force I could muster.

The blade sliced into the cacodemon as easily as a steak knife carving a baked potato, releasing an astonishing welter of blood commingled with more unspeakable fluids. She screamed in mortal agony and relaxed her death-grip on my shoulder. Blood welled up from the wounds, flowing freely, which would have been a much greater point of immediate concern to me if I hadn't begun to fall toward the water, flopping ankles over ears in a spin. Above me, the cacodemon's wings folded closed and she too dropped, her limp body cutting the air with all the grace of a stone.

Time stretched out, elastic as taffy. An eerie calm fell over me, despite the increasing howl of the wind in my ears. My mind began to run the numbers calmly and dispassionately. I only had about six seconds between myself and the water from the start of my fall, but everything fell away until even my heartbeat and breathing went silent.

: _David, aim for the bridge._

A hundred-foot drop isn't _much_ more survivable than a four-hundred-foot drop, but it at least gave me a fighting chance. Besides, if the Rekkrs were on-scene as they were supposed to be, they might have a solution which could get me safely to the ground.

The problem was that the bridge railing was coming up fast—and I was several yards on the wrong side of it, plummeting toward the river.

: _It doesn't matter! Keep moving toward the bridge!_

I did—and to my surprise, my fall slowed to a float.

Through my augmented sight, I could make out the shapes and shadows of a handful of people, standing in a loose knot, with a riotous rainbow of magickal energy flickering and weaving among and around them. One appeared to be doing something with time, the silvery ripples shining in brilliant threads amid duller earth tones of force magick, the scintillating primary colors of elemental magick, vivid green healing and lightning-bolt hues of mind.

All aimed directly at me.

_Hold on, David_ , said a woman's voice in my head I couldn't quite place, but which felt both comfortingly familiar and caused me to tense up. _Relax your body and let us do what we have to do_.

: _The Chieftain is right, David_ , Svetalina added quietly.

My jaw dropped. My ex-girlfriend, Marjorie Shields, had been promoted to Svetalina's position upon the death of the latter. Although we were the same age, Marjorie had demonstrated a talent for police work which had made her Svetalina's natural successor. I hadn't spoken to her since the end of my novitiate, mainly because my actions had played a critical role in Marjorie's accession. The fact she'd come to oversee this personally was either a very good thing—or a horrifically bad one.

Still, my fall had slowed significantly, which I could only view as a plus. If it meant I had to deal with an ass-chewing over the public aspects of this caper later, well, at least my ass would be alive to _be_ chewed.

And then, because it wouldn't be a day in my life without the universe ensuring things turned as pear-shaped as possible for me, everything went wrong all at once.

The magi using the force and elemental magicks somehow fouled each other's aim, canceling their individual effects out and causing me to resume my downward velocity with compound interest. Some insane part of my brain which wasn't busy screaming and windmilling its arms at my impending demise wished I had a sign labeled "YIPE!" so I could channel my inner Wile E. Coyote and give the folks on the bridge one last show on the way down. Time did that weird dilating thing again, where it felt like I had all eternity to kick back, smoke a cigarette, down a snifter of good cognac and maybe even give myself one last orgasm before I splattered myself against the water.

I fell, spreading my arms and legs as wide as possible like I'd read somewhere to spread the inevitable impact over the maximum possible surface area.

And fell, mentally composing a letter to my family which I'd never actually have time to write, never mind send or deliver.

And fell, praying to deities well-known and obscure, stolid and nonsensical, passionately held truths and outright fabrications to get me out of this mess.

And then I whacked into an unseen, spongy barrier just above the water with enough punch to make my eyes cross.

The cushion of air gave under the force of my impact and imparted a portion of it back to me, flinging me twenty feet back into the air before I tumbled back down again to get thrown _ten_ feet into the air to fall again to get thrown _five_ feet into the air. Each successive impact stole a little more of my breath and awakened fresh bursts of pain from places I didn't even know I _had_ places, until my entire body was one solid mass of knotted torture. I bounced up once more and braced for impact, hoping this time it wouldn't hurt so much—

Instead of landing on the barrier, I fell about fifteen feet and smacked facefirst into the cold water of the river.

Colors burst behind me eyes, shades and hues and tints I don't even know if words exist for. A spectral voice with a Russian accent said, : _Hold on, David_. The pain swelled until it became the entire world.

Warm darkness draped itself over me like a favored childhood blanket, replacing the cold, roiling embrace of the river, and I leaned in, accepting its protection, committing myself to its ebon wings. In return, the darkness took flight, bearing me gently off somewhere beyond the torment of my broken body and the shock of the icy water.

Everything was too bright, too white, and I screwed my eyes tightly closed against the assault, inhaling through my nose. Even the air _smelled_ white, redolent with bleach, pine-scented cleaning chemicals and something antiseptic I couldn't put my finger on.

I blinked hard, flinched, closed them, blinked again, flinched. Each time I managed to keep them open just a little longer, taking in details of my surroundings in a flashing barrage of camera-still images which blurred, wavered, duplicated themselves and resolved into intelligible views.

Click.

My hand, almost as pale as the white coverlet it rests on, the scarlet of the tube running from my wrist off the side of the bed a shocking contrast. Just at the edge of my line of sight, a monitor with a green tracery of what I presume to be my pulse on a field of back stands a silent vigil. There are numbers, but I can't see clearly enough to read them and figure whatever they are, they're probably okay or I wouldn't be alone right now.

Click.

The overhead fluorescent bank glares down into my eyes, pitilessly as the Arctic sun, and I flinch, turning my head away from that awful, intrusive, all-pervasive light.

Click.

A window covered with horizontal blinds set in a wall the same blazing white as everything else, hinting at a nighttime cityscape, the jeweled lights festooning the hills in a way which might provoke romantic or pensive thoughts in equal measure.

Click.

A white door opens off to my right. A man on the shady side of his prime steps through. He's dressed in pale blue scrubs and carrying a clipboard, wearing the gold caduceus-and-pentagram ensign of his vocation on his breast pocket and a stethoscope draped around his neck. He looks like one of those fatherly types Central Casting uses for the role of the experienced yet compassionate surgeon. With his simple presence, he resolves the question of where I am: only the Healers attached to the Motherhouse wear that emblem.

_Snap_. Time lurched back into linear progression rather than a series of disconnected singularities.

"Ah, good, you're awake!" The Healer smiled as if this was the best news he'd had all week. "We were wondering when you'd come around."

"How long have I been here?" I tried to ask. It came out in a rusty croak, as if a whole pond's worth of frogs had made my throat home.

Either through long experience, training or innate ability, he seemed to understand me just fine. "You've been here for eight days." He hesitated. "Do you know where 'here' is?"

"Yuh," I croaked. "Water?"

He nodded, and I tracked him with my eyes as he picked up a plastic cup from the table next to me and took it over to the sink, filling it up. Offering it to me, he said, "Take it slow."

I sipped at the water until my throat felt less like I'd swallowed a weed whacker, then took a longer drink. "Okay. I'm at the Portland Motherhouse of the Ordo Hermetica, under the care of the Healers. Sage Grimmr Arnulfssen is expecting me to deliver something to him."

He smiled again, with genuine warmth. "That's very good, David. Let's run through some other information, if you don't mind."

We went over my full name, date and place of birth, first childhood pet, first car. All the usual things you'd expect someone to ask if they were trying to establish that you were in fact you and weren't suffering any memory glitches. Then he threw me a curveball.

"When did you earn your Adeptus rank?"

I scowled and closed my eyes as a flood of unpleasant memories from that terrible day battered at my brain, but gave him the date, time and the fact that I'd done so in the main Ritual Chamber of the Motherhouse.

"What is your magickal designation?"

"I am a Soulforger," I whispered.

"'A,' not 'the?'" he pressed.

"A," I said firmly. "There are others around. It would be like you calling yourself 'The Healer' or a necromancer saying they were 'The Necromancer.' Sounds like a cheesy comic-book villain."

He rolled that around in his head a few times and nodded. "Okay, fair enough. What's the last thing you remember?"

"Falling," I said without hesitation. "I was falling off the 405 bridge. The Rekkrs were there, but something went wrong and I almost took a terminal dip."

"That's right. The Rekkrs retrieved you from the Willamette and brought you back here for treatment. I'm not going to lie, Mr. Campbell, it was touch and go for quite some time. We performed a mixture of healing magick and good, old-fashioned Western medicine to bring you back up to a condition where you could breathe on your own. You were in a magickally induced coma and intubated for about five days, which is part of the reason your throat feels so sore." He shook his head. "The damage was extensive enough we weren't sure if you were going to survive."

"Is he awake?" came a high voice from the door. I let my head sag to the side to see Grim standing in the doorway, his navy-blue pinstriped suit pressed to perfection and his beard bound up in a complicated twist of braids which would have taken an ordinary human being hours to pull off. Being as he was a vampire, he'd probably done it in twenty minutes, the showy, bloodsucking bastard.

"He is," the Healer said. "He knows his name, he knows where he is and has some idea of how he got here. I see no evidence of motor or mental impairment, no indication of subjection to dark magicks and all his injuries appear to be mending quite nicely." He assaulted his clipboard with a couple of quick jots from a pen he'd spirited from somewhere and then stood. "I'll leave the two of you alone."

"Thank you, Healer Michalak," Grim said, inclining his head in a way which looked from my angle like one of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore nodding. "Would you ask Chieftain Shields to join us at her convenience?"

"Of course, Sage," Michalak said. He gave me another smile. "You're doing great, David. Keep it up."

"Uh. Yeah. Thanks," I said wittily. He nodded at me and left.

"How are you feeling?"

"Like I fell five hundred feet into a river."

He grunted. "I expected as much."

We went on like that for a few minutes, Grim probing me about my condition and getting minimalist answers. Marjorie strode in, wearing a light denim jacket over dark jeans and a tee the color of sunset after a storm, her Rekkr badge riding on her belt.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"I'm feeling like I'm going to get _real_ tired of that question, _real_ quick," I replied. "For the last time, I'm tired, sore, my throat hurts and I feel like a demon dropped me into the Willamette, which by some strange coincidence is exactly how I wound up here. Can we _please_ move along to the real reason you're here?"

Grim nodded. "We can, and will. First, can you remember anything leading up to your fall?"

"Heh. _Can_ I," I grumbled. "But I have a feeling you're not talking about the leadup to becoming a Soulforger."

Marjorie shot me a withering, warning look borne of long familiarity with my wiseass ways. "If you start off with the first sentence of Genesis, I may shoot you just on general principles."

"'It was the best of times—'"

"Dickens is _not_ an improvement," she snapped.

I held up my hands in mock surrender as best I could, given that one of them had a metal spike stuck in it and attached to a clear rubber tube. "Okay, okay."

I took them through the last conscious day I'd had up to now, starting from Vincent dropping me at the DMV and going frame by frame from there. Grim gave me a subdued doubletake which crashed down into an expression I'd usually associate with a sudden migraine, while Marjorie visibly tensed when I told them about my first encounter with the cacodemon. They exchanged an inscrutable look.

"So the cacodemon implied she already knew what you were after before you did?" Marjorie asked, leaning forward, eyes narrowed the way I imagine they would if she was peering through the scope of a sniper rifle. It was the first time I'd ever seen her as Marjorie the cop/soldier instead of Marjorie the novice or Marj, my blushing, bashful yet experimental and daring lover, and it scared me more than anyone who's been nekkid in front of me should.

"Yeah," I said, plucking with one hand at the underside of the relentlessly white comforter in a gesture which derived from nerves rather than guilt. Cops being cops, I didn't trust Marjorie to be able to tell the difference, long acquaintance or no. "She called me 'Soulforger.'"

"And there was no chance you could have misheard or misunderstood?" Grim said, looking as if whatever he'd had for lunch was trying to claw its way back up his gullet.

"Nope," I said. "She said one thing with her mouth and a wholly different thing with her mind, but they both sounded the same, just—one I heard with my ears and the other I didn't."

"No possibility you misunderstood or imagined?" Marjorie said.

"Oh, come _on,_ Marjorie," I snapped, the final frayed strands of my patience giving way under the strain of her scrutiny. "When have you ever known me to have _that_ much imagination?"

"Hrm," she grumbled. "You have a point. Perhaps we should make some discreet inquiries, just in case you're telling the truth."

"In _case_?" I echoed hotly. "Wow, you've gotten a _lot_ more suspicious and hidebound—"

"Do you still have custody of the object, Mr. Campbell?" Grim interjected, in a clear attempt to settle the two sets of raised hackles in the room. Marjorie shot him a killing glance but said nothing.

"If you mean the box containing the ring which Loki stole, getting himself and everyone who's ever touched thing cursed forever and ever, yeah," I said. "And frankly, I'll be glad to be rid of it."

"Excellent. Hold on to it just a few minutes longer. There is more we need to discuss."

We went through my memories of the chase, the destruction of the car, the police officer taking wild potshots and my tumble into the drink. It turned out Marjorie had been on scene for the majority of the finale, starting just as the cop fired on me. Through the agency of some mechanism I figured I was better off not knowing, Marjorie had managed to talk him down and get him relieved of duty. Thankfully, he hadn't managed to hurt anyone, a fact which both pleased and horrified me. Granted, I'd been his intended target, so I was just as grateful not to have been the unwilling recipient of a dose or two of high-speed lead poisoning. Still, and I know this is a radically wacky idea, but shouldn't there be some kind of expectation that the people we task with carrying weapons in the name of societal safety be able to actually _hit_ what they're aiming at?

The mess on the bridge had been resolved through a series of legal and informational contortions whose scope and scale gave me a whopping case of vertigo. It seemed the Motherhouse's behind-the-scenes PR machine had managed to hand-wave the whole debacle with the exploding hybrid away as filming for a movie, complete with properly filed permits from both the city and the Portland Police Department.

When good old Officer Whatsisnuts came on the scene, he wasn't in on the caper. Thinking he'd blundered into a terrorist attack and the carnage was real, discharging his weapon at the presumptive bomber, earning himself some time off duty and a psych evaluation. Only a handful of people had seen me fall into the river, and the Rekkrs had dealt with them through a combination of generous financial compensation and _sub rosa_ memory manipulation.

"Your escapade cost the Motherhouse an immense amount of money, goodwill and political capital," Marjorie said. "I know Officer Russell. He was one of the top recruits in his academy class. Now his career is shot to hell because of your talent for hot-and-cold running explosions."

"That's a little unfair, don't you think?" I complained. "This was supposed to be a milk run. Get the ring, get back and all's well that ends well."

"Speaking of," Grim broke in smoothly, "I think now would be a wonderful time to get the ring to safekeeping."

Reaching Between, I pulled the steel box from the æther, raising it by its handle and waving it between Grim and Marjorie. "Who wants the bad news?"

Grim's face crashed downward into an expression of borderline horror. "Hold, if you please, Mr. Campbell," he said, reacting to my cavalier handling of the box.

He made a complicated gesture using both his hands which looked a whole lot like two spiders making amorous advances toward each other. Glowing golden threads grew from the intersections of his fingers, creating an elaborate cat's-cradle of light roughly the size and shape of one of those spinning globes they used to have in elementary-school geography classrooms, before the lawmakers decided they knew how to teach kids better than teachers did. The scintillating globe would easily accommodate the box without brushing the sides, based on a quick eyeball evaluation.

"If you would, Mr. Campbell, please put the box in the sphere."

I pushed the box forward and through the weave of the spherical web. The glowing threads parted easily, allowing the steel a clear two inches of passage on either side. Once the box was fully ensconced in the sphere, the web snapped back to its full brilliance, sealing the case within. Grim moved one arm like the Queen of England bestowing her benevolence upon her subjects during a parade, and the threads of ethereal light sealed themselves into a solid ball, something like a skein of yarn constructed from sunshine, until the box was completely invisible for the blaze in which it was cocooned.

Grim and Marjorie exchanged a glance composed of equal parts satisfaction and concern. "You didn't actually _touch_ the ring, did you, David?" Grim said.

"No," I replied. "Fafnir said I didn't need to. I only got close enough to sense the magick on it and see the ring reproduce. I'm convinced it's either the genuine article or such a good fake that only its original maker would be able to tell the difference, because that thing has enough magickal wallop packed into it to level Portland."

He sighed and nodded, a weary shadow settling over his craggy features. "Very well. Chieftain Shields, you and your Rekkrs will take the box to the secure vault." Without a word of acknowledgement, she raised a hand and began to gently push the ball of light out of the room. Some territorial bit in the back of my brain took a moment to appreciate watching her leave. Ex or not, she still had a terrific ass.

Grim turned back to me once Marjorie was out of sight. "Mr. Campbell, I have arranged for your family not to worry about you. Your mother and sister left a number of very strident messages on your cell phone before I became involved."

"How did you kn—"

I bit my tongue before I could finish what I already knew was an insipid question. Grim had been around for twelve centuries. You don't live that long by learning a few tricks and factoids about human nature. Sussing out my phone's passcode would pose nothing more than a mildly interesting challenge, like figuring out an unexpectedly inspired crossword clue. The level look he gave me announced in stentorian tones his opinion that the question was beneath me.

"Your family thinks you won an all-expenses paid vacation," Grim continued as if I hadn't shoved my foot in my mouth up to the calf. "Which reminds me—" He produced a plain white envelope from his breast pocket and placed it in my non-stabbed hand. I opened it to find a check drawn on the Motherhouse's primary mundane account.

The amount was a lot higher than I'd expected, and I blinked a silent question at him.

"The Bursar was—somewhat put out to have to write that check," Grim said, the barest ghost of a smile tugging one corner of his mouth upward. "I explained that as you were injured on an errand for the Motherhouse, it was only right that you should be compensated for every hour you were detained. His reaction can only be described as the result of a minor aneurysm, but as you can see—" The predatory smile won, tilting his lips upward into a grin with enough teeth to transform his face into a _memento mori_. "—he eventually managed to find hitherto unknown reserves of the milk of human kindness within himself."

I snorted. Milk of human kindness, my ass. More like fear of Grim handing him his head if he gave the Sage an overabundance of grief.

The Bursar was a dried-up old child's stick figure concept of a wizard expanded into three dimensions, with a reputation for pinching pennies hard enough to make Honest Abe's portrait tell whoppers before he surrendered his grip on them. His beard had been white and down to his knees when I'd begun my novitiate. Between his rheumy, yellowish eyes and a whispery, asthmatic wheeze of a voice which scuttled and crept on too many feet to be comfortable on the ears, few people attached to the Motherhouse cared to spend more than a few moments in his presence, a state of affairs I strongly suspected he went to some pains to cultivate.

I'd once had to ask him for a refund of a book fee due to an unexpected change in my course schedule. The ensuing fifteen-minute lecture on the duties of fiscal and temporal responsibility every student and Adeptus owed the Portland Motherhouse had felt like a fifteen-hour endurance exercise in letting creepy-crawlies wander all over my skin. Afterward, I'd decided further refunds to which I might be entitled would just have to be considered a donation to my alma mater. Better that than enduring another such lecture, or the stack of paperwork sufficient to refinance a house I'd had to fill out to get a measly hundred bones' worth of textbook fees returned to me.

My writing hand still bothers me sometimes in damp weather, for which I totally blame the Bursar's sadistic meticulousness.

Grim's smile broadened a little. "Quite," he said, responding to everything I hadn't said. "He requested that I not send someone so accident-prone on errands for the Motherhouse in future."

"I was going to make the same suggestion," I retorted, pointing to the IV jab in my wrist with my free hand. Since it was still encumbered by a check of sufficient heft to ensure me an unusually comfortable month or two, the gesture lost a fair degree of effectiveness. "I mean, sure, all's well that ends well this time—"

He held up a hand. "Say no more, Mr. Campbell. I will not ask unless your particular skill set must be employed. Fair?"

I gulped. It wasn't within screaming distance of the clear "No, we won't be bothering you again" I'd hoped for, but I knew it was the best I was going to get. "Can't wait," I grumbled.

His smile went a little sad, and much of the predatory vibe drained away until he just looked—old. "I understand. Rest well, Mr. Campbell. Hopefully the next time the Motherhouse has need of your services will be less exciting."

Moving with a lightness and grace which belied his muscular bulk, he disappeared through the door, leaving me to ponder what the next job he might feel my skills would be suited for would like look. None of the answers I came up with were reassuring.

I stared out the window at the midsummer late afternoon. A handful of lights had already begun to twinkle down in the city, harbingers of the oncoming night. Sailboats, tugs and larger commercial vessels made their way up and down the Columbia River as the sun made its way toward the low mountains separating the west side of Portland from the suburbs beyond.

I stared out the window, and pondered.

I thought about the friendly Svartalf who'd died to make sure a family heirloom got the hell away from him and his. I thought about a cacodemon and state employee who was willing to die to get her claws on the ring. I thought about the cop who'd just been doing his duty as he saw it and gotten himself in trouble as a result.

Mostly, I wondered how likely this little escapade was to come back to haunt me later.

My injured shoulder pulled as I stretched, new scar tissue and freshly healed skin and muscle complaining at my audacity. The check didn't seem like sufficient compensation for this shit. I glanced down and realized I was only wearing my white undershirt; the Hawaiian eyesore was nowhere to be found. At least _something_ good had come out of this shitshow.

"Well, ring-a-ding demon," I muttered into the cool, air-conditioned silence of my hospital room.

The room didn't bother to answer.

~The Beginning~

_The Soulforger Chronicles_ **continues with the full-length novel** _Adeptus,_ **now available at Smashwords.com**

Jericho S. Wayne resides in the Pacific Northwest and currently feels no pressing need to be anywhere else. He is fascinated by occultism, human sexuality and attempting to decipher the meaning behind the lyrics to "I Am the Walrus." He appreciates hearing from his readers and encourages you to contact him through his website at http://jswaynereloaded.com or on Twitter @jerichoswayne.

The first known print version of the story of Andvaranaut and its opposite number, Draupnir, appear in the _Prose Eddas_ by Snorri Sturluson in the early 13th century. The facts surrounding this story have been reported faithfully from both the translated _Prose Eddas_ and scholarly website, drawing upon points of congruity between the various sites and sources. J.R.R. Tolkien is on record as having drawn heavily upon the legend of the cursed ring Andvaranaut, and Norse culture in general, to create the One Ring which posed such menace to Middle Earth, and particularly the culture and language of the Dwarves.

The author firmly believes there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, etc. Should the reader find themselves in the presence of a ring which reproduces itself eightfold and which seems to cast a spell on the viewer which all but demands it be picked up, the reader would be wise to back away, as far and fast as possible.

Available from Smashwords, Walmart and other online retailers

Writing as Jericho S. Wayne:

Ring-a-ding Demon: A Novella of _The Soulforger Chronicles_

Adeptus: Book One of _The Soulforger Chronicles_ (available 9 Jan 20)

Sybarite: Book Two of _The Soulforger Chronicles_ (available 13 May 20)

Outcast: book Three of _The Soulforger Chronicles_ (available 10 Sep 20)

Chieftain: Book Four of _The Soulforger Chronicles_ (coming soon)

Sage: Book Five of _The Soulforger Chronicles_ (coming soon)

Writing as J.S. Wayne

Wail

Dusk

My Antarctica _(novella)_

Eat My Shorts: The Absolute Best of J.S. Wayne (So Far)

Scarlet's Game _(novella)_

Fantastic Dominants and Where to Find Them: A Player's Guide to the Ultimate RPG _(nonfiction)_
