Immortal Need (13 page)

“Thank you,” he said to Valerie when she sat back.

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“Yes, I do. We were unfair to you when we saw you the first time.”

“But I understood,” Valerie said with a kind smile.

“But it must have been hard for you,” Sevani pressed.

“It was. But your friendships more than made up for it. So we don’t have to worry about that.”

“Still, I thank you,” Sevani urged.

“Again, sorry to break up the powwow, but we’ve got more trouble,” Lei said over the earpiece.

“There are more? How can there be more?” Valerie asked, already rising from the bed and rushing toward the door.

“Yeah,” Lei continued, his voice deadly. “And you’ll never guess who’s with them.”

Chapter Nine

Alexander never liked traveling to Aesir, the home of the light gods. He was grateful that Valerie had gotten them flashing capabilities. He hadn’t thought he would be using them quite this way, but they helped. They had allowed him to get here quickly. It just wasn’t an easy thing to do. It took all his concentration to flash, and he was a little slower on the flip side for a few minutes when he did. It was the reason they didn’t flash during battle. Those few minutes of slowness could lose them their mission, and none of them could afford that.

When he failed his first mission, he had experienced pain that he had never felt before. Freya was the queen of knowing her charges’ worst imaginable death to repeat over and over. For him, at the time, it had been to be buried alive. The idea of suffocating and not being able to do anything about it had crippled him. He’d seen it in his past and had never wanted it to befall him. Freya had buried him alive over and over again for three weeks straight. He came out of it half-crazed and determined that he would never fail again. Now, he had the chance to pay her back for her tortures, to defeat her at her own game.

He’d left as soon as they’d finished getting the information from Valerie. The sooner he got to Aesir, the faster he could try to find a way to help his friends. He hadn’t had many of those chances in his life. When he was thirteen years old, his father had sold him into bondage. It was enough that he looked like neither of his two older brothers nor his father but like another hunter in the tribe. They hadn’t cared about his tears. They’d simply wanted him gone. No man would raise another man’s child. His mother had caused gossip and shame to touch their household, and his father would save face any way he could. As they took Alexander away in a net, he watched his father drag his mother out of the house and his brothers pick up large stones. Infidelity, for a woman, meant death by stoning, and they had no mercy. From there Alexander traveled from the southern region of Arcadia, which he’d known all of his life, to the northern region of Locrian, from whence the great warrior Ajax had hailed. But he had not known the treasures that Ajax, prized warrior of the Locrians, had enjoyed. Locrian was so very different from Arcadia. Arcadians lived simple lives, surrounded by untouched vegetation and land. Most of the people were hunters or shepherds. It hadn’t been a glamorous life, but it had been one filled with peace. Locrian gave him no such peace.

No, under Machus, the merchant who had purchased him, he’d learned what it was to hate and what it was to handle pain, true pain. Over the next five years, he cleaned chamber pots, tasted the horsewhip, learned the rage of warriors denied their victory and who took the loss out on him. He learned to hate with the depths of his being. Such rage and shame had brewed through him as he became a man. In his time, a man was full-grown at twelve or thirteen summers, when he was big enough to take up a blade and get his first kill. As a slave, even that was taken from him. He was a child until his eighteenth year and was old enough to appear unmanly to others, with no wife or children. Every day Alexander fought for his sanity, fought for a semblance of his former self. Each slight he’d marked. Each insult he’d remembered. He’d learned to not speak first, but to listen, to be quiet. A fool spoke first. A wise man thought first. He’d learned it all at the hands of Machus. For that, he supposed he should be grateful, but he knew that Machus would never see it that way. The man had deserved the end he got.

When he’d turned eighteen, the age in which he would become a warrior to repay Machus for the
kindness
of taking care of him, his bonds had been cut. Alexander could not believe, even then, he would not be free, that he would have to repay Machus for all the hurt he’d given him, that he was expected, as a newly freed slave, to work for his former master to alleviate his bond price. When Machus had asked him if he was ready to take his place, Alexander had accepted, knowing to keep his enemy close would be better for him. He’d taken the blade in his hand, kneeling before Machus, even though bile rose in his throat. He’d waited, patiently, until the warrior-king had turned around, and then he’d stabbed him. He’d taken his blade in hand and skewered Machus through his back. But he hadn’t stopped there. He chopped Machus limb from limb, reveling in his blood and in his death.

Odin had appeared before him then. The All-father had stared at him with one eye, the other just a gaping hole. His thick, graying beard had reached his stomach, and he’d been wrapped in dark robes. His hair was wild around him, and he looked ragged. Alexander hadn’t known at the time, but Odin had given up eating when he realized what Loki had planned for them all. Odin, angered that he would not have a great warrior for Valhalla due to the inglorious death Alexander had given Machus, had turned over the young Alexander to Freya as punishment. He’d become a Watcher and had learned even more hatred as he grew into a man. Freya had the presence of mind to withhold taking his soul and having Valerie wait to give him the immortal gift, until he’d matured into a full-grown man. When he matured, she sent him out on his first mission. His job was to guard the next warrior of Valhalla until he’d escorted him to his appointed location of death. Alexander then ended his existence. Odin never chose a man who was not a warrior. Alexander had killed soldiers, mercenaries, spies, and other warriors of fortune over the years. His hands were so dirty he didn’t think they would ever be clean. In the end, he was a stone-cold killer.

How could he be anything else when he killed the men he protected? He’d traveled the world, been a fighter in civil wars, only to challenge a general and kill him. Some men, sure, he took pleasure in killing—those who spouted genocide as the only way to win, ones who didn’t care if they killed women and children, even those who had betrayed their own men and left them to die while they made their escape. Oh, he had loved killing them. He’d seen them as Machus, deserving of their punishment. Then there were those he wished he had never met, men who had families at home who would mourn their passing, the men who had shared pictures and laughter with him at campsites, the ones who were fighting for the good of mankind. He’d taken their lives as well and regretted it. Neither Odin nor Freya had cared. His soul was black, so dark he couldn’t hope to ever have light. He could not fathom ever having a woman love him as Sevani had Nila, or as Lei loved Valerie, though the two fought to hide it. He could never allow anyone that close to him. In the end, he trusted only three, and they were as cursed as he was. Alexander was not an innocent man. None of the Watchers could say they were innocent. They’d killed so many. There was no way they would ever be free of their sins.

But he saw the pain in Sevani’s eyes when he’d told them what Freya had planned, and that he could not abide. He may be marked for a cursed afterlife, but while he lived, he would do everything he could to help his friends. They deserved his support in every way. If there was anything he could do for them, he would. When he had first become a Watcher, he hadn’t trusted anyone. He’d hated them on sight, and, he was sure, they felt the same way. Lei, as a thief, had never trusted a soul. Sevani had known what trust was, but murdering his wife had shaken his very foundation. Valerie didn’t know trust could exist since she’d lived through the politics of the gods. They’d all watched each other with suspicion. Even though there should have been a bond between them all, because of their bondage, it hadn’t developed. When Alexander had lost his soul, he’d been mindless. All he knew was how to deal death, to cause destruction. It wasn’t until Sevani, many years later, had wrapped his arms around him and told him that he’d become a man tested in fire, and Alexander had cried for the first and only time. It was then Alexander believed he could be something else. They’d looked to Sevani for leadership. Valerie added softness in the only way she knew how, through her fierce loyalty to them. Lei made them laugh, smiling in the face of danger and using sarcasm to show them light in the dark. Alexander found his penchant for thinking first earned him the place of their wisdom. They listened when he spoke because he did so seldomly. They all had created their places within their own hierarchy, something that Freya had never been able to break.

Now she sought to tear them apart. Alexander couldn’t let that happen. They’d fought too hard to gain what little peace they had. Valerie would be crushed if Lei was taken, Lei would never be the same, and Sevani would lose the sanity he’d fought so hard to reclaim if he had to kill Ayah. It was that sure knowledge that had sent Alexander on this fact-finding mission.

Aesir lay on a plane surrounded by thought. The gods were lazy in their power. Once they had learned they could die by Loki’s subterfuge, and that their deaths were assured in Ragnarok, they’d focused on nothing else. Their homes became shadows of what they once were. Alexander saw nothing around him but gray fog. With a thought, he could make the atmosphere around him anything he chose. The gods had designed Aesir so they simply had to think of where they wanted to be, and the world around them would change. So, Alexander thought long and hard about the two he wanted to see. Of the worlds, both human and of the gods, there were none who had the wisdom and memories that Huginn and Muninn had. They were the physical manifestations of thought and desire, respectively. He knew that human historians said they were shamanic helpers of Odin, and projections of him. Such was not the case. They were guides and helpers of the gods at large. They just chose to reside with Odin the most. He was the king of all gods, and, Alexander was sure, the crows enjoyed the notoriety.

Of the nearly twenty gods and goddesses who had once ruled the world when humans believed in them, only a handful remained who made themselves known to humans. It seemed with humans continuing toward the path of self-realization, the gods of the old world were losing their hold. It was ironic, considering their war would endanger the very beings who didn’t believe in them anymore. Alexander had wondered what happened to the other gods and goddesses. He remembered Tyr, Thor, Heimdall, Fenrir, Zeus, Hera, and countless others when he’d lived. They’d been as real to him as the humans around them. They weren’t like the one God of today’s Christianity. They squabbled, fought, loved, and felt pain much like humans. He remembered thinking that he could become a god one day if he fought well, valiantly. So many gods and goddesses, all disappearing under the sands of time like dust under a boot. How he wished that Freya and the others had gone just the same. Then he never would have been cursed. None of them would have. But they had survived, and now he was in Aesir, waiting on two birds to show up so he could talk to them…the life of an immortal.

It took a little while, but the fog around him slowly started to change. The ground grew solid beneath his feet. It was dry, and the cracked earth looked as if it had seen no water in a century. It was startlingly white. A large, gnarled tree, bare of any leaves on its branches, sprouted before him. It grew until he could no longer see the top of it. The trunk of the tree was at least thrice as wide as he was. He looked up, knowing Huginn and Muninn would be coming down from the top. From their perch the crows could see everything, know everything. He just hoped they would be willing to answer him. He took a chance coming to them. They could very well turn him away, but he was betting, because it dealt with Freya, they would assist him. It was known that Freya was the Vanir manifestation of Odin’s Aesir wife, Frigga, and had replaced her after their ancient war. Alexander didn’t try to understand, but he could use it now. Huginn and Muninn had preferred Frigga’s kindness to Freya’s dark soul. It was whispered that they wouldn’t come to Freya, no matter how much she asked. If he told them he planned on defeating her, they may just be willing to help. It was a gamble, one that could get his immortal life cut short, but he was willing to try.

Two black specks circled high above his head, growing larger as they came closer. Alexander waited patiently as the two crows banked and then landed on branches nearly eye level to him. They were much larger than natural crows. They were the size of buzzards on steroids. It was unnerving to have their beady, black eyes peering at him as they cocked their heads in opposite ways in an oddly syncopated movement. Their feathers, darker than midnight, ruffled as they settled on the branch, their talons scratching along the bark. Their beaks were long and shone like obsidian. He was the only speck of color in a world of black and white. When one of the crows opened his mouth with a squawk, Alexander could see a row of sharp, blackened teeth that looked as long as his pinkie to the first bend. He didn’t think birds had teeth, but these obviously did.

“Watcher, this one, come to see Huginn and Muninn,” the bird on the left said.

“Not really Watcher. Not strong enough,” the one to the right said.

“He has a question for us,” Lefty said.

“No questions. No answers to give,” Righty replied.

Alexander tried to keep up with the conversation, but it was hard when they sounded exactly alike and challenged everything the other said. He got the odd feeling he was talking to Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

“My apologies, Great Ones, for coming to you like this. I require your assistance,” he began.