Page 181 of Red Rooster

At least he wasn’t cuffed anymore.

He sat down on the edge of the cot and plucked at the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Might as well make the call; he was stuck and there was nothing he could learn here, down in the bowels of this fucking place.

A low scraping sound launched him to his feet. His pulse leapt, and he spun a tight circle in his cell, arms outstretched, wishing like hell it was a knife strapped to his arm instead.

“Somebody there?” he barked, putting every ounce of Marine Corps bravado he possessed into the words.

Sound like an inhale. An exhale. A chuckle, dry and rusty. He heard the first sound again, the metallic scrape, and he saw movement. Not in the cell beside his, but in the one beyond it. It was dimly lit, and his view was of shadows sliding over one another, down low against the floor.

Then another shift, and a face slid into the dim light of a caged bulb.

A lightly-accented man’s voice said, “Oh, don’t worry, I can assure you I’m chained up – how is it you Americans say? To hell and back? I don’t know.” A pale hand lifted and pushed snarled, pale hair back from the face, revealing blue eyes. “I am like you: a prisoner.”

Rooster eased back down to the cot. “Yeah? What are you in for?”

“Killing my brother,” the man said. “Or, attempting to, I suppose. Only I wasn’tactuallyattempting. I just needed the great lout to sleep for a little while.”

“O…kay.”

“It’s all very tedious.”

Great, Rooster thought.They locked me up with a fucking lunatic.

“It’s very boring down here,” the man said, and Rooster noticed two things when he shifted again:

One: he wore a heavy silver collar and matching cuffs, all of it hooked together with a mass of chains.

And two: there was a little orange cat curled up on one of his thighs.

“I’m Val,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Rooster.”

A pause.

“Oh,” the man said, finally, smile forming on his gaunt, shadowed face. “Rooster. Oh,really?”

~*~

Val had been thinking quite a lot about the end of days. Ragnarok, his mother’s people had called it. When the heroes were summoned and Loki’s children broke the world.

Melodramatic ponderings, perhaps, but he supposed it was only natural that he should sulk and dwell on worst-case scenarios when he couldn’t dreamwalk.

Hobble him, his brother had said, and he’d rattled the cuffs on his wrists andlaughed. Laughed right in Vlad’s face like the insolent little shit anyone who’d ever known the two of them had always claimed he was.

But then the techs had come in, and they’d pushed up his clothes and stuck little electrodes all down the back of his neck, and along his collarbones, and hooked their trailing wires into the collar that locked around his throat tight enough to choke him.

It was a shock collar, Vlad had explained. When he dreamwalked, he went down into a sort of trance, and his heartrate slowed, even slower than a normal resting rate, as if he truly did leave his body. When that happened, Vlad said, dispassionately, the collar would be triggered, and it would flood his body with electricity. Three short, sharp pulses designed to pull him back to his body. New technology, he said, the likes of which wasn’t anywhere near ready for human use.

He’d tried it, once, when Vlad and the lackeys had left, just to see what it was like.

He was still shaking, fingers spasming of their own accord, nerves still jangling with tiny aftershocks.

So, naturally, his thoughts turned to the apocalypse.

For the Vikings, Ragnarok had not been a true final reckoning. Life – a new life – would begin after. It was merely an end to the gods. The old way dying to make room for the new.

And if the old way was stirring…out where Vlad had buried it…if Romulus trulywaswaking…