And if the old way was stirring…out where Vlad had buried it…if Romulus truly was waking…
Then he supposed all the things he kept threatening just to get a rise out of the doctors were indeed unfolding.
If he was searching for a sign, it had just been dropped two cells over.
“Rooster,” he said again, and his blood sang in his veins. A dread so acute it felt like joy. “A nickname, hm?”
A beat. “Yeah,” his new companion – Rooster – said slowly.
No doubt Val sounded crazy, but that was out of his control, now. His pulse beat like bird wings inside the cage of his chest. “Tell me, Rooster, are you at all familiar with any of the old religions? Let’s just say, oh, hypothetically…the Norse gods, perhaps?”
Another pause. “Uh. No.”
“Okay, not so hypothetically, then. Do you know anything about the Norse gods?”
“No.” The light was dim, but Val could see him, sitting on the very edge of his cot, big-shouldered, and strong, his too-long straw-colored hair the stuff of longship captains.
Val could have choked on delight. Could have vomited from the fear. “Well, allow me to elucidate.”
He was vibrating, and it wasn’t just aftershocks, now. Poppy sat upright on his leg and meowed a little protest. He stroked the back of her neck with shaking fingertips. “I’m only half Norse, you see,” he said. “My mother was Norse. I have her hair. But, that’s not important. Anyway – she talked often, when I was a child, about the old legends. Humans call them myths nowadays, but to her it was religion. Like Jesus on the cross. Father tried to bring her over to Eastern Orthodoxy, as he had done, but she only did it as a token, to please him. Deep down, she still made offerings to her gods.
“She didn’t like to talk about Ragnarok. A gentle soul, my mother; she could rip a man’s head from his body with one movement.” He mimed doing so, as his chains would allow, and they rattled. Poppy hissed in displeasure and retreated to the shadows. “But talking about the end of the world – of the gods – depressed her. So she didn’t talk about Heimdall slaying Loki, or Balder being the only one to return, but she would talk about the beginning. About the way three cocks crowed to herald the start of it.”
Rooster stared at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“There was Fjalar in the wood, and there was the soot-red rooster at the gates of Hel. And there was Gullinkambi. Golden Comb. The glorious red rooster that lived in Valhalla, whose crow woke the gods and heroes so that they might ready for the coming battle.” His smile was starting to hurt his face. “Which one are you, Rooster?”
*
This guy was batshit crazy.
Maybe that was the point, he thought, briefly: lock him up with a psycho who drove him so nuts he eventually hanged himself with his own boot laces.
“Look, man, I have no idea what you’re going on about, but it’s got nothing to do with me.” He shifted back on the cot so he could rest his head against the cool stone wall, and pointedly didn’t glance back over at his fellow prisoner: Val, he’d said his name was.
“Hmm, maybe not,” Val said. “A coincidence perhaps. But I wonder.”
Rooster bit back a sigh and pushed up the sleeve of his hoodie. Started picking at the edges of the duct tape.
“Do you believe in coincidences? Because I don’t. They happen, to be sure, but in general, pessimist that I am, I don’t think chance comes much into play…What do you have there?” The chains clicked together as he pushed up onto his knees.
“A phone,” Rooster said with a grunt as he pulled the tape loose, and took a good chunk of his arm hair with it.
“Ooh.” Val gave another creaky chuckle. “How did you sneak that in, I wonder?”
“Magic.” Which was apparently what was giving him three bars of coverage this deep underground. Huh.
There was more chain-rattling as Val perked up another notch. “Who are you going to call?”
“The Ghostbusters,” Rooster deadpanned. When he didn’t get a response, he turned to glance over at his fellow prisoner, thumb hovering over the Call icon. Val was frowning at him. “You know. The Ghostbusters?”
Val’s expression turned sad. “I’ve been locked up for five-hundred years. I’ve learned quite a lot about your world, considering, but not all of it.”
“Five hundred…” Jesus. “Are you. Um.” He wet his lips. “One of those…those wolf things?”
A fresh smile stole across Val’s face, knife-sharp, and there was just enough light for Rooster to make out the sharp points of his canines. “Oh no. I’m much worse.”
Rooster turned back to his phone.
“You didn’t answer me. Who will you call? The person who magicked your phone?”
“Friends.”
“Ah. An escape plan.”
Rooster hesitated another moment. The guy was just staring at him, with his too-sharp teeth, like something out of one of those terrible movies Red loved. “What?”
“Do you really think these friends of yours will be able to get you out of this cell? That they’ll fight their way down three levels to find you?”
“I…” Deshawn would try, and probably get himself killed in the process. As for Rob and the others, he only had legend to go on, and no firsthand knowledge.
“Here’s a thought.” There was something suggestive, almost obscene, in Val’s smile now. “How about you set me loose, and let me help you?”
Rooster looked at the bars. At the phone. At his lack of weapons. And back at the blond in shackles. “You’re serious.”
“Absolutely.”
“I dunno if you noticed this or not…but you’re chained up as fuck, man.”
“An inconvenience, yes.”
“Dude–”
“But now that you’re here–”
“Look at me.” Rooster gestured around him. “You’re not the only Rapunzel in this tower, okay? I have to sit on my ass and wait to be rescued, too.”
Val snorted. “So unimaginative. Listen to me.” He rocked forward and pressed his thin face to the bars. “If you get a gun away from one of the guards, will you know how to use it?”
For the first time in days, Rooster felt himself crack a smile. “Yeah. You could say that.”
*
Jake didn’t knock, just let himself into Dr. Talbot’s office, and was rewarded, momentarily, by the affronted look the doctor lifted toward the door. It was smoothed over quickly to a look of surprise, because Talbot was nothing if not committed to his kindly doctor fa?ade, but for a heartbeat, Jake had seen what lay beneath: something oily, desperate, and angry.
“Major Treadwell,” he began. On his computer screen, angled so that Jake could see, a man’s face stared out: a live Facetime session. Jake noticed, absurdly, that the man on the other end of the line had startlingly red hair; the same color as Ruby Russell’s.
But speaking of Russell…
“Sir,” he said before the doctor could say anything else. “It’s Roger Palmer. He walked up the driveway about ten minutes ago.”
Dr. Talbot’s face blanked over with shock. “He what?”
“He was unarmed. Walked all the way from the road; several cameras picked him up.”
“He’s alive?” A spark of anger glimmered to life behind the lenses of his glasses. “I thought you neutralized him?”
Jake thought of the trees bending toward the girl, the unholy light in her eyes. The unemotional tone of her voice as she’d bargained with him…and he’d known he would go along, because she was a girl wrapped in fire.
He heaved a sigh. “I left him unconscious and bleeding out in a forest in Wyoming. There’s no conceivable way he could have found his way here.”
“And yet,” Dr. Talbot’s voice was deadly calm, “he did.”
“I’m going to interrogate him. Personally. I was just headed back to the cells now, but I wanted to let you–”
“The cells?” The doctor braced his hands on the desk and shoved himself to his feet, the color bleeding out of his face. “You put him down there with Valerian?”
“Well, yes, those are our only cells…” But the fine hairs on his arms lifted. What had he done?
Dr. Talbot said, “Go and get him.”