Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (4 page)

The mercenary frowned. “You know him? Cold, reedy fucker. That stupid landing strip beard thing on his chin, like all of them.”

But Wulf didn’t answer him. He spun his blade between his hands and then rose to his feet, still smiling slightly as he did, and the mercenary’s voice trailed off.

Wulf shot a glance at Tyr, who nodded as if his king had issued a set of orders, and then Wulf exchanged a longer, darker look with Gunnar. Eiryn told herself there was no reason at all she should care what sort of things her half-brothers were communicating to each other like that. Gunnar had wanted to kill Wulf a month ago, but what the hell. Things changed, apparently.

Eiryn wouldn’t mind chipping away at Wulf a little bit herself. Not to kill him, necessarily. He was decent king. But he was a shitty older brother and it turned out there was a little sister inside her after all. A bloodthirsty one.

Though she’d rather die than show that side of herself. To anyone.

“To the ships.” Tyr’s voice rang out. “We’ll camp on the beach tonight. Ellis, take your thumb out of your ass and put this fire out. Jurin, do a run to see if these assholes left any of their crappy guns lying around. Gunnar can use the scrap metal.”

But Eiryn stopped listening to the war chief and his usual barked orders, because Wulf turned to her. Making it clear he’d known her precise position all along. The look he fixed on her, his bright blue eyes electric and shocking in the dark, was as steady as it was unnerving.

“Walk with me,” he said quietly.

It wasn’t an invitation.

Eiryn fell into her usual place at his shoulder without comment, one quick step behind him. Wulf walked with the same lethal grace that infused everything he did, his long strides eating up the distance and his sharp gaze moving from one dark shadow to the next, cataloguing any potential danger without any conscious thought. She knew, because she did the same.

He didn’t speak, and that was much worse than a lecture. She could handle anything that came at her, but waiting for it to come was like splinters under her nails. She gritted her teeth and kept going, trying to figure out if it made tactical sense to speak first. To offer an apology for abandoning her post or some excuse. He wouldn’t believe either one, of course, but it might be good strategy. Then again, it might just piss him off.

She was still mulling over the best approach when he stopped, on a flat ridge that rose up over the water. The cove where they’d anchored their ships was still a little bit down the coast. The moonlight bounced off the two sleek crafts a distance offshore, bobbing idly with the tide. On the beach, those who’d stayed behind from the temple raid had lit a bonfire and when the wind changed, Eiryn thought she smelled meat. They hadn’t brought any fresh game with them on the weeklong journey from the eastern islands, which meant someone had gone hunting while she was running down a rambling old mountain, trying to avoid incineration.

She had no idea why that struck her as poignant. Life going on the way it always did, even in this drowned world in the middle of a botched mission and a deadly explosion, while she’d stood there debating whether or not to pretend she was dead.

Wulf didn’t look at her. He stared out toward the dark, inky sea instead, and Eiryn told herself it was the wind that made her neck prickle. The remnants of the temple, acrid and harsh on the smoky breeze. Not the still, furious way her half-brother held himself, as if he was moments away from carrying out her execution right here where they stood. Not the pulsing temper she could see written all over his lean, powerful frame.

“If I can’t trust you,” he said softly, so quietly she almost thought she’d imagined it, “then you’re of no use to me. You might as well declare yourself my enemy. And if you are my enemy, there’s no particular reason not to slit your throat and dump you over this cliff, is there?”

Eiryn didn’t defend herself. There was no point. The truth was, she should have made sure he was safe and she didn’t. She’d run. The temple had gone up and she’d been gone. She hadn’t even thought about him until she’d stopped.

And there was a time when that tone in his voice—not quite a threat, not yet—would have rocked her.
Killed
her. She would have done anything to prove to him that she was trustworthy. That he could trust her above all others.

That she was nothing like their father.

But that was gone. Smoke. Eiryn noticed the great, gaping hole inside of her where her need to please Wulf had been with a kind of distant numbness. What did any of it matter? Her whole life was a lie and her half-brother, her king, had known it. Hell, he’d perpetuated it.

Deliberately. As if her years of loyalty bought her nothing from him, not even the simple courtesy of the truth.

“Maybe I don’t trust you,” she said.

It wasn’t exactly treason, quiet and yet distinct against the night. But it was profoundly stupid.

Eiryn steeled herself as Wulf turned toward her, slowly, his bright blue eyes blazing with something hard and complicated that she couldn’t read. She saw her fate in the grim line of his mouth, but she wasn’t afraid.

Maybe that was what was wrong with her. She’d stopped being afraid. And this was a big, bad, ruined world filled with nothing but scary things and their scarier cousins, all lined up to eat a person alive if they could. Having no fear wasn’t brave or courageous. It was suicide.

“Then we have a problem, little sister,” he told her, and there was nothing lazy about him any longer. Wulf was steel and mayhem, all the way through, and Eiryn knew she was screwed. “We have a big fucking problem.”

Riordan didn’t watch Eiryn walk into the dark woods with a clearly pissed-off Wulf, which could very well be a walk to her death or some other severe reprimand for her behavior. He forced himself to look anywhere but at her retreating back.

What happened out there was none of his business. No matter if tonight was the night Wulf had finally had enough of her shit. How the king of the raider clan handled one of the warriors pledged to serve him, who was moreover his very own blood sister, could not possibly concern or involve Riordan less.

He slapped his trademark grin on his face and laughed at Jurin as the redheaded behemoth got ready to trudge off to gather up any stray, pointless guns left behind by the idiot mercenaries, as ordered. Because bombs could go off in supposedly abandoned temples, Eiryn could stand in a clearing with her blade drawn like Riordan was the one who’d set the charge, and still, nothing would shake the brotherhood more than if Riordan didn’t keep his easygoing mask in place.

No one needs that much intensity, kid,
Amos, the old war chief, had told Riordan years ago when he’d been thirteen years old, grappling with his guilt and his ambition and his own rapidly changing body in equal measure. He’d tried to kill himself in every bladecraft or sailing lesson, certain he’d needed to prove his worth daily for the clan to keep him around, and he’d otherwise been an odd, lonely boy who punished himself by staying aloof from the rest of the clan kids his age.
Lock that shit up, put a smile on your face for five seconds, and believe me, this will all get a lot easier.

Riordan had taken those words as gospel, and no matter the unlikely, grizzled, and potentially deeply evil source.

He’d started grinning. Just
grinning
while carrying on doing exactly what he’d always done, and it was amazing how many more people wanted to talk to him, adults and kids his own age alike. He hadn’t changed a single thing about the way he’d approached his lessons or his life in the nursery, and yet, with a smile on his face, he’d been clearly
enjoying
himself—not overly dark and serious or worse, strange. It had been revolutionary. It was how he and the always magnetic, compelling Wulf had become friends before either one of them had been a brother, much less a king.

“I left a few waterlogged shotguns that way,” he told Jurin now, nodding in the vague direction of the clearing where he’d taken his captive down. He kept grinning like he was at a party, and hated that once again, Eiryn had gotten under his skin. Because normally these days he didn’t notice if he was acting or not. He
was
the Riordan people thought he was. Except when it came to her, damn her. “They didn’t help him much.”

“Waterlogged guns for watered-down little bitches,” Jurin boomed, so loud it should have made the captives flinch—had they been capable of doing anything so active while Gunnar dealt with them in his particularly creative way. “I’d sooner take on an enemy with my own dick than with some ancient fucking artifact.”

“Neither one shoots straight, brother,” Riordan replied, smirking. “I’m not sure your dick would be an improvement.”

Jurin clapped him on the shoulder. Almost tenderly, for him, and it was still a wallop. “That’s not what your mother says when I make her scream my name.”

“Asshole.” Riordan shook his head at his brother. “My mother’s dead.”

Jurin let out a laugh that bounced off the pale white birch trees with their scar marks and careened around the small, smoky clearing. “She’s that loud, brother. And I’m that good.”

Riordan laughed and waved the big man off with an appropriately rude gesture. Then went back to worrying about shit that had absolutely nothing to do with him. His role in the clan meant he trafficked in secrets and the things people wanted desperately to keep hidden, which meant he often knew all kinds of things that weren’t his business, but he couldn’t pretend Eiryn was part of his job. If she was, this would all be a hell of a lot easier.

But nothing about Eiryn was ever easy.

He’d warned her, not that it had done any good. Eiryn was nothing if not a pain in the ass, a trait she shared with every other member of the brotherhood, in fairness. They were all too lethal. Too full of themselves. Too conscious of the fact they were the most powerful raiders—and therefore the most powerful people, period—in the entire world. But unlike all the other, brawnier and hairier assholes he called brother, Eiryn always had been a pain in the ass. From the time she was just a little kid with her dark brown hair unbrushed and streaming in an inky shadow behind her, getting underfoot while she followed him and her older half-brothers around the Lodge. Straight on through to that summer when he’d lost his mind and taken a forbidden and deeply fucked-up taste of her that he still wasn’t sure how he’d lived through, given who shared her blood. And then all the years since, when if she could have chopped him into pieces with her dark gaze alone, he’d have been eviscerated a thousand times over.

Nothing had changed tonight. Nothing ever changed. But he was in a shittier mood than he should have been because of it. Raw and restless and more than a little brooding, the way he was every time he broke the silent, seething agreement between them and tried to talk to her about anything that wasn’t strictly clan business.

Maybe stop trying, asshole,
he told himself darkly.
The way you should have ten years ago.

It didn’t help his mood any.

The entire night had been pretty much bullshit from start to finish. It had been an easy enough objective—maybe too easy, Riordan thought, now that fire and pieces of temple had rained down on his head. It had seemed straightforward enough in the planning stage, back in the raider city in Gunnar’s junkyard basement lair. Go to the temple on the map. See if all that crap Tyr’s mainlander mate spouted about electric lights and ancient power grids was true. And then, if possible, flip a switch, find a satellite or two, and change the world.

No problem.

Riordan was a tracker, not a tech head. He didn’t get the fascination with old hunks of machines that rarely worked the way they were supposed to in this waterlogged, piece of shit new world. He understood the wet, cold earth he’d grown up in, knee deep in mud out in the fields and barefoot in the woods. He could read it, predict it,
get
it. He could find anyone, anywhere, and no matter if they didn’t want to be found. He tracked information as well as he did people, and he gathered it whether the people in question wanted him to or not. Usually they really didn’t. He could find paths and trails where everyone else saw nothing but a sheer mountain face and their own certain death. He could put together two random conversations and a stray sighting of the right person in the wrong place and foil a half-cocked assassination plot. And he could kick major ass while he did it.

He didn’t entirely understand what the fuck the war chief’s woman wanted to do with the ancient power station and server farm that had stood on this hill earlier today—dubbed a
temple
by the church in their never-ending quest to claim anything that smacked of tech and make it a holy remnant instead—or why Gunnar, the clan’s preeminent tech head, was as into it as he was. Or why his king wanted to go along with it, for that matter. Sure, lights were great. He enjoyed them himself and the fact some asshole bishops wanted to keep what few people were left in the dark was reason enough for Riordan to want to set the world ablaze himself.

But he was not a fan of mercenary dickwads creeping around blowing shit up—especially not when he was standing a little too close to the exploding thing in question. And then, adding insult to injury, the cockroach who’d run straight into him on that dark hillside had been about as much of a challenge to take down as jacking his own dick.

All that
before
Eiryn showed up, hot eyed and alone the way she never was these days, and a hard, swift kick into same knotted pit of regret and fury inside him where she’d always hit him hardest—

He needed to stop. This was what happened when he dropped the dumbass game they always played and actually talked to her. He drove himself crazy.

And the night had already been crazy enough.

“Are you keeping a vigil for these assholes?” Gunnar asked gruffly, jolting Riordan out of his own bullshit. He should have been relieved—and he was lucky it hadn’t been some more douches swinging blades and peppering the trees with more wild gunshots that never seemed to hit their targets. He eyed Gunnar and what was left of the mercenaries at his feet.

“Just wondering how long you were going to sit around gossiping with cockroaches, old man,” he replied easily enough, with his usual grin.

Gunnar didn’t quite smile in return—the brother had always been far too committed to storming around looking tortured, even these days when he should have taken that shit down a notch or two with his own, personal nun to ease his pain—but the corner of his hard mouth turned up. Slightly. Very slightly.

“About as long as you plan to stand there with your dick in your hand,” he retorted in his usual growly, unfriendly way. “You get hit on the head or something?”

Riordan grunted a wordless reply to that, because what could he say? That every time he saw Eiryn it was like seeing a ghost and it still pissed him off about as much as it had ten years ago? Gunnar might act like he didn’t give a shit about anything but the machines he treated like pets and the mate he treated like his favorite machine, but Riordan had yet to meet a man who wanted any male of his acquaintance anywhere near his sister. Much less another brother.

He headed out of the clearing instead of bleating out his feelings like a punk ass bitch, and Gunnar fell into place beside him. They left the bodies where they were, with no funeral pyres to show the men the respect they hadn’t earned. Mercenaries were creatures without honor. Whores, plain and simple. They killed for wealth and power and their own selfish gain. They took no vows and were a part of no clan. They deserved to end up as food for scavengers in the dark woods near the temple they’d destroyed. Their names would never be remembered. Their comrades would not record their loss in ink upon their skin. It would be as if they’d never existed on this torn up, leftover world.

Riordan forgot them the moment he left the clearing.

It was a short hike back to the beach where they’d moored their ships earlier today, an easy half-hour over the rocky, forested ground, and the moon obliged them by coming up as they strode through the night. This part of the Catskills bordered the sea directly, with a variety of cliffs etched out from the water that had risen in the Storms and then swallowed down whatever land had been there before. There were whole cities beneath the water in this part of the world, and on clear days with a soft wind it was possible to look down into the past as if memories lived there, a short dive from the surface. But this was a dark summer’s night. There was nothing but too much fire in the wind and the August moon coming up a blood orange in the sky.

It felt ominous. Like the rest of the night’s epic shit show, now that he thought about it.

Down on the stretch of sandy grass a few yards back from the high-water mark, there was already a fire going and something cooking. Gunnar headed toward the fire and the two blond-haired, pale-skinned women who tended it. One was Joelle, a busty, happy camp girl with a particular affection for the rougher stuff, bless her. The other was Maud, Gunnar’s nun, short-haired and graceful in the collar she always wore around her neck. Riordan stripped off his battle harness as he rounded the fire, pleased to see what looked like a healthy set of rabbits on sticks in the flames as he passed. He navigated around black-haired Ellis, with the bones of his enemies in his beard, who’d thrown a camp girl under him to fuck, hard and fast, on the grass a few feet away from the fire.

Battle lust was a bitch. Riordan grabbed his pack from the pile nearby and looked around, trying to decide what he needed to tend to first. Some of his brothers were down by the water, letting the sea wash away their sweat and blood. Others, like Ellis, were working out their adrenaline overload in other ways.

Riordan threw himself down on a patch of grass near the fire, using a smooth-faced rock to lean against. He pulled out his supplies from his pack and cleaned off his blade as he sat there, waiting while a camp girl with long, golden-brown limbs shown to perfection by the tiny, stretchy shorts she was wearing, tended the brother next to him. Bast had his head tipped back as he propped himself up on his elbows, sweat gleaming all over his pale gold skin, his cuts and scrapes cleaned and one even bandaged by the woman who was now crouched over him on her hands and knees, taking his cock deep into her mouth. She moved her hips while she worked, rolling them from side to side in a restless rhythm that Riordan recognized instantly even though he couldn’t see her face beneath the curtain of her hair. The motion in those hips meant she was Lyla, and on another, rowdier night, Riordan might have slid up behind her and taken that juicy cunt of hers up on its wordless, needy invitation.

Instead, he watched. Like all the camp girls, Lyla had a deep affection for sucking cock. In her case, it was probably because she’d grown up on the mainland and had spent the first part of her life trying and failing to be compliant, as the priests and the petty kings demanded of their subjects. Compliant citizens were called upon to repopulate the drowned and meager Earth, but not to enjoy themselves while they did it. Sex was a chore, a duty, a sacred responsibility.
Bullshit
.

Instead of finding their pleasure where they could, idiotic compliants subjected themselves to church-sanctioned winter marriages, finding a fuck buddy at the September equinox and spending the dark, stormy winter months trying to make babies for the good of mankind. Come the spring, if the woman was pregnant, they’d take another year together to bring the child into the world. If she wasn’t, she’d pick a different winter husband. And she’d repeat the cycle until she stopped bleeding.