Loved her more. Loved her less. Had been there when the bomb shattered everything.
The other bomb…had brought me Zara.
My path was foreordained through this landscape. What remained of life dribbled away to fission into the hiss of dark regrets. I was going into Death, the great unknown, yet she followed close behind. Her little grabby fingers slipped between the truth of this place and tried to stop me. My legs ground onward, tick-tock, tick-tock, counting steps in clockwork. This walk must be.
One could not refuse Death when he/she called.
Val. Val! Stop!
At her sorrowful cry, I almost turned, but to stay in one place became more and more impossible the longer I tried. My feet refused to go where I wanted them to be. They were anchored in sludge. I continued my walk.
Keep going.
There was no destiny for me, no future, except death.
For a blitzed shiver of this nothingness time, a memory shook into existence. The slash of the knife as it took out His throat, the Nightmare King’s throat. My throat. I, Valor Lacroix.
I had been both him and me, a little doll inside my own body, cast there by the worst of evils.
Val! Zara’s cry had become weaker, more pitiful. The tears of her sadness were written in sobs.
I must ignore her.
YOU DO HAVE A DESTINY AND A FUTURE, IF YOU SO CHOOSE.
A fat blue snake slithered by, endless and beside me, and ahead of me, and around and around, forcing me to stop.
I cannot stop, I told it. Stillness is anathema.
SHHHH, the snake said. THERE IS TIME IF I/WE MAKE IT. I CAN FINAGLE YOUR RETURN TO LIFE, IF YOU SO WISH.
“You can?” Spoken words felt so wrong here. I swallowed. “What are you? How?” I could sense Zara waiting, no closer, no further.
THE HOW IS NOT RELEVANT. I AM JÖRMUNGANDR AND I WILL IF YOU ASK ME.
“That simple.” The pressure to move again was building to unbearable levels in my head.
Even so, this agreement would have a catch. If I remembered anything about life, it was the way of car salesmen and lawyers, who added clauses they thought you would never read.
“I don’t believe you.”
WELL, THERE ARE SMALL-PRINT STIPULATIONS. THERE WILL BE BALANCE. YOU MUST PAY A TITHE, BUT LATER.
“What sort of tithe?” Cautiously, I felt my neck. The thrust of the knife and the rip of the blade were fresh. Blood spilled and ran hot over my hand.
AN UNDISCLOSED TITHE. TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT. BUT, KNOW THIS…I SEE YOU. I SEE WHAT YOU ARE AND CAN DO, VALOR LACROIX. YOU ARE NECESSSSARY TO YOUR WORLD.
“Huh. The current deal does suck.” Pressure throbbed in my mind and threatened to tear me apart if I remained where I stood.
Take death or take life and pay something later?
The warmth of Zara under me—kissing her, fucking her, the love I’d felt as she strived to save me from the Nightmare King. The decision was close to made even as I thought, and more blood spilled as I stalled. What if the tithe was dying seconds after I lived again? “Is this a trick. I am bleeding—”
NO TRICK. I CAN HEAL YOU, IF YOU LET ME IN.
Well, that made the choice easy, providing I trusted this snake called Jörmungandr.
“Yes—”
In a thousand pieces, I fell through a roar that deafened, and fell some more, twisting and spinning, the noise now a deafening orchestra, and I recalled how to breathe, how to scream from a throat that was sliced from ear to ear.
How to scream and make precisely…no noise…at all.
Apart from the gurgle of someone with air coming out the wrong hole, while they drowned beneath the darkened sea.
The sky was up there somewhere.
The roar was the sound of the ocean.
My eyes sprang fully open, and I latched onto Zara’s arm, her face inches away as she dragged me from the water. Worry etched deep lines above her eyebrows and reddened her eyes. If she shed tears, they were lost in the spray and splatter of the sea.
The weakness of a man who has lost almost every drop of blood in his body made my limbs weak as piss. They drifted back and forth in the surging waves. Mouth wide, I gasped for the air that wouldn’t arrive.
I am dying. The Nightmare King has won.
LET ME IN, boomed the blue-and-fucking-rude snake that loomed beyond Zara’s pale face. REMEMBER ME? It hiss-grumbled.
Zara didn’t flinch, didn’t look over her shoulder. Was the giant snake even there? Delusions from blood loss were possible.
Psst. Blue snake. Walk of Death. My memory served those up.
I thought for a while. Oh. Right. That.
Fuck. Permission granted.
CHAPTER 4
THE TENTACULAR FOUR
Zara
The halfway realm faded and was gone, and I hadn’t accomplished what had to be done—saving Val.
Floundering, I found the seabed with my feet, and I stood. Water cascaded off me. With outstretched arms, I’d kept hold of Val, kept him high. He floated with his face above the surface. It was no use. I’d lost him. I’d lost him, but I was too exhausted. My chest felt tight, packed with sharp things. By the time the four strangers splashed up beside me, Val had ceased to do more than pretend to breathe—his mouth was closing and opening, gaping like a stranded fish.
“Is he safe? He’s not the Nightmare King anymore?” a man asked, his deep voice quiet. Was trying to be calm and placate me? We were unknowns to each other. Perhaps he feared me. Or maybe he was just being nice.
“No. He’s escaped. To another body, to somewhere else.” I thought I spied comprehension in his eyes. These strangers understood possession. Duh. Tentacles waved above this one. “He’s gone.” Throated clogged with grief, I shook my head and kept shaking it for far too long, so I didn’t have to add the obvious words: This is Val, the man I thought I’d come to love, and he’s dead.
“Come on then. Let’s get you both off this beach.”
They carried Val’s body, and I trudged with them, up the sand and down a track to a parked van. Someone wrapped a towel over me they’d found somewhere on the shore. I was naked which was nothing, this night.
Whoever they were, it wasn’t so much that I decided to trust them but that I did not care anymore. After all I’d done, the struggles, the planning, and Val was dead anyway.
I sat in the middle row of seats, fumbling for a seat belt. Doing the normal stuff helped. They placed Val lengthwise on the seat, with his head in my lap and a towel over me. At the weight of him on my thighs, my heart caught. I bit my lip, gnawing it.
The woman offered me an assessing look after she laid him down.
“I’m Viktoria.”
“Zara.”
“Hi, Zara. If you dispatched the King, we’re lucky. All of us.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Especially him, since he’s healing from that terrible wound.”
“What?” Had I misheard?
“See.”
I brushed wet hair from my eyes and stared as she swiped the corner of the pale towel over his throat. The grotesque slice across the front of his neck had been mostly hidden under the blood. Now it wasn’t, and even as I watched, it healed some more. The skin showed a shallow red groove and not the gaping cut I’d frantically tried to hold together with my hands.
Then…he drew a long, deep breath and coughed up water.