Valknut: The Binding (7 page)

The Wolf-Angus howled and swiped at the
birds. Snarling, he caught one by a wing and swung it hard into its
mate. They tangled, fluttered frantically, and hit the ground. The
Wolf-Angus again fixed his yellow gaze on Red.

Loose rubble shifted under Red’s retreating
boots. He staggered back, slamming into the pile of rock he and
Angus were supposed to clear from the ledge. The Wolf-Angus closed
on him, cutting off his escape.

“Sheeeiit.” Red tried to scramble backward up
the pile. “Angus, it’s me—your ol’ friend Red! Whatcha wanna kill
me for?”

The Wolf-Angus paused as though considering.
“Well, I guess...because I’m hungry.”

And he laughed, a growling animal sound that
tore the remaining will from Red’s body. He went limp and slid to
the ground, waiting for sharp teeth to end his life. As the
wolf-Angus approached, another raven dropped from the sky, bigger
than the other two—the biggest Red had ever seen. A king grandpappy
of ravens, with one eye shriveled shut and the other a startling
blue shining from its black head.

A desperate hope fluttered in Red’s chest.
Maybe three birds could succeed where two had failed. The
Wolf-Angus snarled and grabbed for the great raven. It dodged him
easily, slashing a bloody gash across the wolf-Angus’s arm.

Red eased to his feet, ready to run when the
raven next attacked. The bird wheeled over the wolf-Angus, uttered
one long, echoing cry, folded its great wings, and dove straight at
Red’s head.

Surprised, Red forgot to move. The raven
struck his face like a blast of wind, spraying a wide circle of
black feathers that evaporated before they hit the ground. Red’s
eye ruptured in pain and something filled his head to bursting. He
screamed and slapped at his face, feeling warm, thick streams
oozing down his cheek. Something stirred in his brain, as if the
raven had curled up to nest inside his skull.

A snarl rang through the agony in his head.
The Wolf-Angus. How could he fight it now? Still cupping his
punctured eye, he blinked and squinted at the approaching
monster.

“Come on, Red, ol’ buddy,” the wolf-Angus
growled. “Just gimmee a li’l taste.”

The voice was Angus’s. A cajoling Angus, as
though he had merely asked him to pass the whiskey. Red pressed
back against the rubble, knowing he couldn’t escape. As the
grinning wolf-Angus reached for him, Red leaned back and kicked his
booted toe into the thing’s crotch. But the wolf-Angus caught Red’s
leg and lifted, dropping him onto his back. He leaned over Red,
lips curled, and his teeth looked as big as pickaxes. The air in
Red’s throat felt too thick to breath. Strange thoughts crowded his
mind, babbling uselessly, as if in a foreign tongue. One thought
rose to the top—he was going to die.

King Grandpappy stretched and swelled in
Red’s mind, crowding out his thoughts, stifling his will. It forced
him to tip his head back to see through his one good eye, though
this left his neck fully exposed. Words that weren’t Red’s own
roared from his mouth. “Huginn! Muninn! To me!”

The two ravens returned, carrying a heavy,
rough-hewn spear between them. They swooped low and dropped the
spear on Red’s chest. His fingers curled around its coarse shaft.
His one good eye, now blue as sapphire, met the yellow eyes of the
wolf-Angus and began to glow. The Wolf-Angus’s predatory grin
became a scowl. He jerked upright and backed away.

“You!”

King Grandpappy grinned with Red’s mouth and
brought him to his feet with the spear leveled at the wolf-Angus’s
chest. The two men who were once wolf and raven watched each other
warily.

“So, One-Eye, are you here to greet me, to
welcome me into this bright new age?” The Wolf-Angus paced, eyeing
the head of the spear. “I see you’ve brought Gungnir—perhaps you
have you have come to kill me, as you should have done all those
millennia ago.”

The one called One-Eye ran a stolen hand down
the coarse shaft of the spear. “As much as I might wish to, Wolf, I
will not. The prophecy that compelled me to have you bound and
buried under the earth still holds.”

“Prophecy.” The Wolf spat and his yellow eyes
burned brighter. “I was a mere pup. I had not destroyed the
smallest village, eaten the tiniest human, or even sampled one of
their sheep. Yet at the word of the Norn, you came to me in
friendship and—” he snarled, his lips peeling back from pointed
teeth, “you betrayed me.”

One-Eye tightened his grip on the spear, but
the wolf only snorted, nostril’s flaring. “Such comedy. I bore you
no ill will those thousands of years ago, but now...

The Wolf’s voice became a terrible roar. “Now
I will kill you, as your laughable prophecy predicts.”

The ground quaked at the sound. The workers
stopped unloading the carts and lifted their heads, some looking to
the sky for thunder clouds, others looking anxiously at the
mountainside for the spill of loose rock.

One-Eye held his ground, waiting for the
tremors to pass. “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps. But not today. And you
will die in the final battle, as well. You must submit to your
bindings and wait.”

“Never. I have no intention of falling under
the heel of the three hags. I will make my own prophecy. You will
die and the world will be razed by chaos and fire. But it is I who
will rise from the ashes to rule the new beginning.”

“You have spent too long in the ground, Wolf.
Look around you. See what these human have become? Soon they will
have weapons that not even your great strength will be able to
withstand. They will not fear you.”

Fenrir smiled, a sight that would fill his
minions with dread over the next century. “It matters not, foul
betrayer. There are other ways. They can be made to defeat
themselves. And you cannot stop me. Not without risking the end of
all things, yourself.”

Faster than human agility should allow,
Fenrir vaulted from the rock shelf. For a moment, he looked like
the wolf he was. Then, as a man, he ran naked into the mountain
wilderness.

But in the moment of escape, distracted by
the elation of long-awaited freedom, Fenrir’s mind opened. One-Eye
glimpsed his plan and knew that it could succeed. In that same
moment, One-Eye also saw the seed of Fenrir’s defeat.

“Huginn,” One-Eye called, and a raven flew
out of a tall pine to settle on his left shoulder. “Muninn.”
Another abandoned the leavings of a cougar kill and settled on his
right. One-Eye stroked each and started down the mountainside. He
would go to Homestead, where the seed grew even now, in the belly
of a woman.

Somewhere under that red hair, smothered
under the eons that were the Allfather, a small voice belonging to
Walter “Red” Galloway screamed.

Chapter 4

Daylight drove the shadows deeper into the
boxcar where Lennie slept, caught in a nightmare. She ran through
the dark, fleeing a pack of wolves with glowing eyes, their snarls
growing closer. A boxcar pulled alongside her and she dove inside.
Wolf teeth caught her jeans and dragged her back. She clawed at the
floor, finding no purchase. Then she was falling, falling. She
kicked out just before she hit the ground and awoke with a beam of
sunlight across her face.

She cracked her eyes enough to see a dirty
metal ceiling. A distant crash of couplers and hiss of venting air
brakes suggested she was on a train, but it wasn’t moving. Her
mouth tasted like she’d been using her tongue to clean the boxcar
floor. Grimacing, she squeezed her eyes shut, counted to five, and
opened them again. Same dirty ceiling, same nasty
taste. 
Yep, I’m really here.
 A noise escaped her
throat, sounding suspiciously like a whine.

Sometime during the night, Junkyard had
covered her with his jean jacket. Its collar stuck up in front her
face, smelling of campfires and diesel. A black button pinned to
the jacket’s lapel said,
My brother jumps from perfectly good
airplanes.
She studied the button curiously. A brother. But
Junkyard had said there was no one to miss him.

A low, mellow voice began to hum a mournful
tune somewhere outside the boxcar. She found it soothing and closed
her eyes, not wanting to move. Then she remembered Junkyard’s
warnings and a vision of tomorrow’s headline flashed before her
eyes: 
Singing Serial Slayer Strangles Stowaway
. She
snorted. But she sat up—just in case.

Her hands had gone completely numb while she
slept. One still clutched the edge of her cardboard bed as if she
might fall off. Smiling wryly, she let go and her fingers began to
tingle.

The other hand rested palm up, fingers
wrapped around something shiny. A loop of silver chain dangled
across her thumb. It couldn't be...

She forced her stiffened fingers to open. On
her palm lay her father’s pocket watch.

Shocked, she poked at it, hardly believing it
was real. She raised its cool, smooth metal to her cheek and
remembered how her father used to let her wind it. “Careful,” he’d
say, winking at her. “If it’s wound up too tight, it’ll have a
nervous breakdown.”

She popped it open to read the inscription,
though she already knew what it said.

      
For
Jarvis—

      
May
there always be enough time.

         
With all
my love,

            
Kathleen

Ramblin’ Red had taken the watch with him,
wherever he had gone. How had it gotten into her hand?

The humming outside turned to song, though
she couldn’t make out the lyrics. She crawled to the door and
peered out, expecting to see Junkyard. He wouldn’t have gone far
without his jacket. But she saw only Jungle Jim. He stood near the
doorway, eyes closed, swaying to his song. She watched him, amazed
that such a rough, simple man could sing so beautifully. Then she
frowned. Could Jim have put the watch in her hand while she
slept?

She tried to picture it, but couldn’t make it
work. He’d been inside the roll of paper when she boarded the
train. Maybe Ramblin’ Red had given the watch to Junkyard. But how
had the older hobo gotten off the train without Lennie seeing him?
And why wouldn’t Junkyard have given the watch to her right away?
None of it made any sense.

In any case, she was determined not to lose
the watch again. She forced her numb fingers to wedge it into the
front pocket of her jeans and noticed a dark smudge on the back of
her hand.

“Oh, hey!” Jim said, finally seeing her. He
trotted over, frowning in concern. “Did I wake ya? I should of
waited until you were up, but I gotta get my song ready for the
Poetry tonight.”

Lennie didn’t answer. She was staring at her
left hand as though some alien thing had fastened to it while she
slept. The smudge was actually a stark, precisely-drawn design of
three interlocking triangles. Together, they formed a fourth,
larger triangle.

Really the opposite of smudge, she thought
dazedly, her mouth hanging open.

Ugly possibilities of how it got there
crawled through her mind, but only the disjointed image of a stick
scratching across her hand persisted like a true memory. She traced
the design with her finger. Something held the stick, she knew. And
that something was a...was a...squirrel?

The dream exploded on her with all its
bizarre detail. She had been tethered like a balloon to an enormous
tree with animals all around, including a one-eyed, talking
squirrel. And at the end of the dream, there had been fire, and she
had fallen...

Her hand went to her neck, feeling for rope
burns, but her skin felt undamaged. The dream couldn’t have been
real. How could a dream squirrel draw a real design on her
skin?

The creeping gooseflesh reserved for ghosts
and bogeymen prickled down her arms. She spit on the design and
rubbed furiously.

Jungle Jim said, “You’re never gonna get it
off like that, Missy.

Startled, Lennie nearly fell out the door.
She had forgotten he was there. “It’s just a—um—an ink stamp.” She
faltered, unsure where the lie was heading.

Jungle Jim shrugged and hopped up to sit in
the doorway beside her. He had changed his suit. This one looked
cleaner, though it was as patched as the other and even baggier. He
smelled better, too, and had combed his hair.

He leaned over the design. “Looks more like a
tattoo, to me. An’ they don’t come off with spit.”

A tattoo. Great. What was it that squirrel
had said? 
With this...thingamajig...I bind you to me.
Wonderful. Now I’m bound to a one-eyed rodent who wants me to do
battle with some wolf.

Somehow she didn’t think this was one of the
dangers Junkyard was trying to warn her about. But then, maybe
Junkyard was the one who had put the design on her hand. Maybe he
had drugged that Twinkie and...and...

“Would you happen to know where Junkyard is?”
She tried to sound casual, but her voice came out higher than
usual. “I-I’d like to return his jacket.”

“He went to get us some grub a while ago. But
don’t you worry, Missy. He left me to watch over
you. 
Jim
, he said, 
don’t you leave her ’til I
get back.
 And I didn’t go nowhere, not even for a second.
Even though you just laid there the whole time. You sure do sleep
good.”

“Not usually.” She usually woke up three or
four times a night, disturbed by her mother’s moans when she was
still alive, disturbed by the silence after she had died. “I guess
I was tired out from all the excitement.”

It seemed odd that she had slept through the
night in such a noisy place with nothing but cardboard for a bed.
She thought of the Twinkie again, but the package had been
unopened. Besides, Junkyard didn’t seem the type to drug total
strangers just to decorate them with tattoos. She checked herself
over for other unwanted marks that might have sprouted overnight.
There was nothing. Just smooth, pale, unmarked skin everywhere she
looked.