Valknut: The Binding (25 page)

The bag lady gathered her coins along the
curb, hunched on all fours like a gaudy, over-stuffed ottoman. “I’m
saving for the future, you know.” She picked up a penny. “It’s
never too soon to start.”

Lennie stooped to help, but the bag lady was
surprisingly quick. She scraped up the coins by the fistful, dumped
them into the purse, and clambered to her feet before Lennie could
retrieve more than a handful. Lennie tried to return the coins, but
the bag lady folded Lennie’s fingers over the money.

“No, child. You keep those. Use them to make
your phone call—though it’ll take more than spare change to reach
your mother, now, won’t it.”

“What? How did...who—”

The right question would not congeal. Then
Lennie noticed that the woman’s hands, still cupped around her own,
were warm and dry despite scrambling after cold, wet coins on
puddled pavement. Impossibly, the layered dresses, the boots, the
ridiculous fake flowers on her hat, were all untouched by the
weather.

The woman was part of it.

Though Lennie’s tattoo remained quiet, though
no shadows beat at the doors of her mind, Lennie knew that this
woman was no bag lady. She had to be part of the gauzy web of
impossibility that had snared Lennie the moment she had latched
onto the door of a moving train.

Lennie tried to pull her hand free, but the
dry grip of gnarled fingers held her fast. The bag lady turned
Lennie’s hand over and nodded at the tattoo as if she had expected
it to be there.

“Yes, you are the one, aren’t you.” She tsked
and traced a finger around the interlocking triangles. “Poor
thing.”

“W-what do you mean?” Lennie didn’t want to
be 
the one
, not to little old bag ladies, or one-eyed
dream squirrels, and especially not to towering shadows that rained
black tar on her soul.

The bag lady looked over her shoulder, then
back at Lennie. She leaned in to whisper. “You wear the Valknut, my
dear. The rune of binding. Odin’s mark.”

As she spoke, the air thickened with the rich
scent of loamy forest floor. Her voice deepened, growing distant
and formal. She straightened and seemed to grow taller, willowy
within dark robes, though she never ceased to be a squat bag lady
in flower print and straw hat. She leaned closer still, holding
Lennie’s gaze.

“You are the one who must face the Wolf. Face
him to find your father and put things right. Face him, and
remember this—
that which can be cut can never be
broken.
”

The words rang in the heavy air, echoing deep
in Lennie’s mind until she knew she would never forget them. Then
the woman dropped Lennie’s hand and fussed with her hat, just a bag
lady again. She picked up her purse and snapped it shut.

“You remember that, child, and do what you
need to do.” Purse slung over one arm, knitting tucked under the
other, the bag lady turned to shuffle-jingle away.

Lennie stood as though paralyzed, a thousand
questions piling up in her throat. Finally, here was someone who
could answer them. “Wait!”

The bag lady paused. Lennie waved her fist in
the air and said, “Do you know where this tattoo came from? And who
are you, anyway?”

The woman looked genuinely startled. “Why,
don’t you know? I’m Urd.”

This must be the “Urdie” Jungle Jim had told
Lennie about. Urdie would be at the poetry reading, he had said.
She knows things. Well, if she knows so much, then she
can sure as hell answer a few more questions.

“Do you know what’s been happening to
me?”

“Did your father not tell you?” Lennie shook
her head and the bag lady tsked. “For shame. Yes, you should be
told—”

Legs hissed through the tall grass on the
embankment. Junkyard’s voice called for her. Lennie ignored him and
waited for Urdie to go on.

“Lennie, come on,” Junkyard said, sounding
more insistent. “Do you want those ’bangers to find
you?”

She glanced back at him. He looked worried
and a little irritated. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was talking to
this lady. She seems to know something about...”

As she spoke, she gestured at the spot where
Urdie had been. The bag lady was gone, without jingle or shuffle or
clicking of needles to mark her passage.

Lennie ground her teeth together so hard that
her jaw ached. “Never mind,” she said. “Go on—I’ll be right behind
you.”

She was getting very tired of having things
disappear whenever Junkyard showed up.

Chapter 15

The falcon circled above two figures
spotlighted under a streetlight on East River Parkway. The air hung
dead in the aftermath of the storm; no wind to catch in feathered
sails. Nevertheless, the falcon paused, hovering motionless on
bowed wings. Its head pointed downward, a predator assessing his
prey.

Lennie Cook, the prey, stooped to pick
something up. The other figure flickered like a candle under his
yellow raptor eye...now a bag lady, sometimes something else,
always Urd. Fenrir hated her in all her forms, for she was the
keeper of the prognostication of his death.

He sank lower on the lifeless air. Carnivore
blood burned in his breast. Frustrated, he clacked his beak and
struck the air with his talon. He wanted to take them both. Now. He
would take them both, but not together. Lennie would live her
illusion of freedom a few hours longer.

Tonight, everything would change. After
tonight, the prophecy that had gripped him in its own taloned feet
would be no more.

He marked Lennie with his predator eye. Then,
with a few powerful strokes of his wings, he plunged down the
embankment into the dark woods below.

***

The gathering for the poetry reading grew by
ones and twos. Hobos ambled down the path, emerging from the trees
like lost scarecrows. Soaked with rain, they escaped the
bone-chilling mist in the relative dry of the boathouse. Some
clambered onto plywood bunks stacked liked track shelving on racks
that once held sculls and skiffs. Others hunkered down on the
crumbling cement floor, jostling to find space under the leaky
roof.

Lennie stopped at the edge of the boat
landing. She thought her teeth might shatter from chattering if she
didn’t find a way to get warm, but she couldn’t bring herself to
enter the boathouse. The panel door gaped open and she could see
dark figures moving within. It reminded her of the Jaycee’s Haunted
House she had entered as a child, where monsters lurked, dark
mounds of unknown terror, grabbing for her in strobing flashes of
twisted faces and clutching hands.

She had never enjoyed haunted houses.

But these weren’t ghosts and monsters. These
were real hobos, men who may have seen her father, would maybe help
her find him. She looked back toward the woods where Junkyard had
gone to collect firewood, took a deep breath, and stepped through
the boathouse door.

At once, a huge man lunged out of the
shadows, snarling like a stray dog. A bulbous nose and broken teeth
loomed at her through the dark.

“Yargh—git on outta here, ya scunge.”
Ulcerous breath sprayed her face. “Ain’t enough room for no
more!”

He shoved her so hard that her feet left the
ground. She landed badly on a jag of broken concrete and tumbled
down toward the river. She skidded to a stop just short of the
water and lay face down, waiting for pain. There would be blood,
too. It was only a question of how much. She groaned and a chorus
of harsh laughter erupted from the boathouse.

And this was supposed to be
a 
safe 
place to hole up?

When she opened her eyes, a pair of boots
stood before her. Her gaze trailed up patched and faded blue jeans
to a jacket covered in slogans. One of them said, 
With
friends like you, who needs enemies
?

“Oh. Hi, Junkyard.”

She sat up, wincing, feeling where every
bruise and scab was going to emerge. Junkyard shifted his load of
firewood under one arm and leaned over her.

“You okay?” He looked more amused than
worried.

“So. These are the poets.” Lennie worked her
tongue around and spit grit. “Literary giants, all. I can
tell.”

Junkyard snorted. “Yeah, well, you know these
artistic types. Very temperamental.” He helped her up and made a
show of brushing dirt off her jacket. “Strange, though. Slippery
Mick usually behaves himself at these things. Good thing he didn’t
notice you were a girl, or he might not have let go.”

“Oh, now there’s a lovely thought.” Mick’s
hulk paced like a caged ogre in the boathouse doorway. Lennie
shuddered. It was hard to imagine how a soft man like her father
could survive ten years in such company.

“Maybe it’s the weather. The crowd seems
rougher than usual, tonight. You’d better stick close.” Looking her
over, he pushed her hair under her jacket’s collar and zipped the
jacket to her chin. “There. Now try acting more like a guy.”

He rummaged in his bag and handed her a wet
wipe. She used it to dab the scrapes on her chin and hands. A sharp
pebble had lodged in her palm. She picked at it, wishing for soap
and water. A hot shower would be even better. Followed by a night
in her own bed. The pebble came loose, covered with blood.

The moment it was out, the wound sealed as if
zippered shut.

She blinked and rubbed at the spot, then felt
her chin. The skin was smooth and unbroken. Just like this morning,
her injuries were gone as if they had never existed. She looked at
the bloody pebble in her hand and a wave of vertigo hit her.

“You sure you’re all right?” Concern entered
Junkyard’s voice.

“Uh, yeah.” She drew a deep breath, fighting
rising panic. “Just banged up a bit. I think most of this blood
came from this one scrape.”

She closed her fist before he could see the
perfectly healthy skin underneath the blood. The last thing she
needed was for Junkyard to start asking questions she couldn’t
answer for herself. “Let’s go get the fire started before I turn a
whole new shade of blue.”

If she was going to have to sit through
poetry written by these people, she could at least be warm.

***

Monte squatted like a molting vulture in a
dark corner of the boathouse. Dried blood caked his scalp. A sticky
clump of uprooted hair clung, unnoticed, to the side of his face.
He hugged his legs to his body and stared over the tops of his
knees, his eyes red-rimmed and peeled wide. Despite the crowding,
the hobos stayed away from his niche, as if in deference for
crowning madness amidst the merely unstable.

The girl and Junkyard Doug sat at the edge of
the landing, waiting for some hobo to start stammering his poetry
in the flickering light of the fire. The girl’s hair was tucked
inside her jacket, as if that would fool anyone into thinking she
was a guy. Monte certainly knew better. He stared at her until his
vision blurred. Never blinking, he rolled his eyeballs back into
their sockets, then refocused on the girl.

El Lobo wanted that girl. Wanted her bad, he
did, and Monte was not going to disappoint El Lobo. Not again. Hell
no, not 
ever 
again.

He sucked a line of drool back into his mouth
and stared at the girl’s slender neck stretching from a black
letter jacket. He could almost see El Lobo’s big hand clamped
around her throat, squeezing, squeezing, blood welling between the
fingers, those searing eyes always fixed on Monte, painting the
world yellow...

Monte’s eyelids crashed down, blinking El
Lobo away. He never wanted to see those glowing eyes again. Not
ever. Ever. Again.

He had to get the girl. But not now. He might
not get away with it, even in this crowd of losers, and El Lobo
would not be pleased, hell no, not at all.

Monte would be patient. Monte would be
smart.

He would wait.

***

Briggs shone his flashlight down the
embankment at a dark gap in the trees. That must be the path to the
boathouse. One of the bulls from the crime scene had given him the
directions. The bull had whistled skeptically when Briggs had told
him he wanted to go to the hobo poetry reading.

“Nothing like a little high-risk boredom on
such a fine night, eh?” the bull said. “You want some backup?”

“Nah, I’m not going to stir anything up. I
just want to make sure Tuttle is safe.”

The bull shrugged. “It’s your Friday. Just
take Oak Street to East River Parkway and head up-river three or
four streetlights. Follow the path down to the river—you can’t miss
it.”

Briggs had always found the words “you can’t
miss it” to be less than assuring, but he thought he could make out
a faint trail leading to a gap in the trees. It looked more like a
deer track than a proper path. He stepped over the guardrail and
started toward it, grimacing as the rain-soaked weeds brushed his
pant legs.

An uneasy feeling grew as he walked, as
though someone had taped a bull’s-eye in the middle of his back. He
paused at the tree line and swung his flashlight around. Nothing
but trees and weeds. But it would be easy enough for someone to
hide. Hopefully his FRC police jacket would make a would-be mugger
think again.

The break in the trees looked more like a
rabbit hole to nowhere than a trail through the woods. He stepped
through the gap, sinking ankle deep into wet leaves. After a few
yards, the path turned, cutting off the dim glow of the
streetlights. The woods were strangely quiet after the noise of the
storm. No wind, no animal sounds, just the drip of collected
rainwater. Spooky. The target feeling itched like a fleabite
between his shoulder blades.

Now he wished he had accepted that backup. He
rested his hand on the cell phone hooked to his belt, but he could
hardly ask for assistance, now. What would he say?
Gee, these
woods are awful scary. Could you send someone?