At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(71)

“Fascinating,” he said.

“It is,” she agreed. “Interesting, too, is the fact that men and women from the Viking Age didn’t consider themselves to be the owners of a solitary soul. Not in the way Christians believe. They knew that their flesh housed many beings. And that these beings were separate and independent.”

“You mean like someone with multiple personalities?” Simon asked.

Christina set down her empty cup and shook her head. “It wasn’t a pathology. It was simply a recognition that there are many parts to every human being. The sense that spirits move in and out of us, that they move all around us, that they exist as surely as the things we see in daylight—earth and trees and water. The nine-world cosmos of the Vikings, based on what little we know of it, defied rationality, even physics. Yet it made perfect sense to every person living in the Viking world.”

“It sounds complicated,” Simon said.

Christina’s silver rings caught the light. “Only to us. And only, some would say, because we’ve forgotten how to see and hear. When we tell ourselves we are but one being with one soul, we limit ourselves. To the Vikings, humans consisted of four entities, at least one of which wasn’t really of us but merely inhabited our hamr, our physical shape. The Vikings walked about with alien beings hiding beneath their flesh.”

Evan looked down at his journal. His pen had leaked, forming a long, narrow blob on the page. If this had been a Rorschach inkblot test, he’d have said the dribble resembled an overstuffed sandwich. A killer might label it a bloody knife. Or a well-fed snake.

“Go back to the strange spirits you mentioned, Dr. Johansen,” he said. “The otherworldly creatures who demanded sacrifice.”

She gently touched his wrist. “Christina will do.”

“And call me Evan, of course.”

“Then Evan it will be.” Christina steepled her slender fingers beneath her chin. “You speak of the gods. And other frightful supernatural beings. Like the water spirit known as the N?cken, who sometimes appeared to the unlucky victim as a white horse.”

“Let me think a moment,” he said.

“Of course.”

Evan bent over his journal, his thoughts running in a torrent, like a flooded river. The pigeon with its breast split. The runic ring that someone had left behind in the woods. The sabotage of Evan’s sound system suddenly sending Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” soaring through his house. Your system was hacked, the tech guy had told him that morning when he called. Reinstall the app, change your password, and let us know if anything else happens.

Who had hacked his system to send him that particular message, assuming the choice in music was deliberate? Why the Valkyries?

Evan knew that these days, Valkyries were often depicted as beautiful, scantily clad women best known for escorting heroes into the eternal paradise of Valh?ll. But that image trivialized their original purpose. During the Dark Ages, the Valkyries—powerful agents of fate who served Odin—had been terrors of the battlefield, swooping in to select those who would die during the carnage of war.

Again he felt that odd shift, as if the world had tipped ever so slightly.

When he looked up from his journal, he could swear that the lights had dimmed. That the air stirred in unnatural ways. He was vaguely aware of Simon shifting in his seat, as if the book dealer had also sensed something.

We’re getting superstitious with the passing of the years.

Evan shook off the feeling. “Tell me more about these beings that shared the Viking world with the humans.”

Christina leaned back in her chair and crossed her ankles. Evan’s knees turned cool in the sudden departure of her warmth.

“Where do I begin?” she asked with her scarlet-lipped smile. “Some of them were truly terrifying. And the way to reach them—the way to open the paths to the Other World and compel the Others to do your bidding—was through a form of sorcery known as seithr. Odin’s cruel magic.”

“Seithr,” Evan repeated.

“Yes,” she said. “The most terrible magic of all.”





CHAPTER 22


Tristan Walters opened wide the door, then lurched around on his heels and vanished up the stairs into the house, calling for Ruley. Addie and Patrick exchanged a glance. She couldn’t believe their luck at being invited in.

She and Patrick and the two handlers crowded into a small entryway. The house was a split-level, with one flight of stairs heading up, another leading down. All the curtains were drawn, and not a single lamp shone. The only light came from the gray day filtering through the open door behind them.

A three-foot-high metal gate bolted to the walls guarded the entrance to the lower stairs. From somewhere below, the dogs continued to bark, their voices deep and wet and throaty.

“Standing on the threshold of hell,” Patrick murmured.

He had pocketed the sunglasses, and Addie saw the gleam of his eyes in the gloom. The CACC agents had a tight grip on their weapons and snare poles; their knuckle bones stood out beneath their taut skin.

Looking around at what she could see of the house—at the broken-down furniture in the living room and the dinged-up walls bedecked with posters of buxom women clad in leather bikinis and winged helmets—Addie had to admit that the place hardly seemed the abode of a killer who wrote complex poetry stuffed with alliterations and kennings.