The Devil's Banshee Read online

  Elinor, Mitchell and Medusa are getting restless. Naturally, my princess’s hands are clasping the back of her neck, while Mitchell and Medusa are playing a game of who can flick the other’s forehead the hardest. It is a game they have taken to playing often recently. The first one to cry out loses. I believe Medusa has a perfect record.

  I turn around and scan the crush of devils who are waiting just beyond the glass doors to the reception area. Black-suited HBI patrol the area. If the vault doors open, they are there to stop devils from running back out to the tunnel that leads to the HalfWay House.

  And then I see it again. In the sea of panicking devils, there is that same flash of vivid red hair I saw earlier. I would recognize it anywhere because it is exactly the same as Elinor’s. When I am meeting my friends, it is always the color I look out for. It makes my stomach dance with happiness.

  Should I tell Elinor of my suspicions? I do not make a habit of keeping secrets from my friends, but a little voice is telling me to keep quiet. The great lord Loki is the god of mischief, and I know it is his slippery tones that are speaking to me now. But for once, he is right. I do not wish to cause more distress to Elinor. She has already said her farewells . . . hasn’t she? As far as I know, she has informed her brother she is going to work in devil resources on a special project for a time.

  Did Johnny not believe her, or did he just want to keep his sister in his sights until the very last moment? I hope he does not intend to rush the reception area when Lord Septimus and Team DEVIL pass through.

  The receptionist is still giggling, Lord Septimus is still flattering, Elinor is still hiccupping, and Mitchell and Medusa are now trying to arm-wrestle without a table to rest their elbows upon. Two HBI agents by the doors shift their positions, and another three charge the increasingly distressed crowd outside. A blue-and-white light starts to flash and people start crying and shoving in a futile attempt to get away from the reception area now that alarms are sounding.

  And now it is not just Johnny I see in the crowd. For standing next to him, watching me watching them, is Angela Jackson. An angel who saw eighteen winters on earth before an insidious disease called cancer claimed her life. When I first met her not long ago, it was back in the land of the living. She and Johnny and two other angels had been dispatched from Up There to intercept the Unspeakable and The Devil’s Dreamcatcher. At that time, she still had turquoise eyes, as beautiful as alpine lakes. Now her pupils are white with a hint of pink, already reflecting the heat of Hell, the eternal domain she has been banished to.

  A third member of Team ANGEL has sidled up to them. The change in appearance that has affected Private Owen Jones, Team ANGEL’s leader, is even greater. His eyes are already pale pink.

  What are they doing here? All around them, devils are pushing and shoving. Yet Team ANGEL does not move. I look around for their fourth teammate, Jeanne d’Arc, but she is not there. She must have already been moved to the asylum.

  Death is cruel.

  Then, as quickly as they appeared, the three angels—now devils—are swallowed by the crowd. I turn to Elinor, but she is watching Lord Septimus.

  I know now that Johnny knows the truth, that Team DEVIL is leaving once more.

  It will stay my secret—for now.

  Fimm

  Alfarin and Elinor

  My father, King Hlif, son of Dobin, wanted to talk. Viking to Viking. Man to man. Devil to Devil.

  In that order.

  I knew what this was about. My father believed it was time I took a female devil companion. The majority of my kin were married. Some more than once, but only because the women they took often ran away.

  It was not hard to run away and hide in Hell.

  “My son,” said my father, sitting on his throne in the hall of Valhalla. “It is time for you to marry. Negotiations will be opened with the family of Elinor Powell for her hand. It would be better if she agreed, but that didn’t stop me with your mother when we were alive.”

  His laughter boomed around the eaves. I said not a word. My father was missing his right ear, sliced off on his wedding night by my mother. She was aiming to chop off something else, accordingly to legend, but was so drunk she missed entirely.

  From what I had seen among my kin, marriage did not seem to be a happy state. Besides, Elinor Powell and I had become friends. I enjoyed her company, and it was refreshing to see the Underworld beyond the eyes of dead Vikings. This peasant girl had brought understanding, compassion, the gift of words and learning and the art of hair braiding into my death. If we married, then Elinor and I would have to fight and throw plates at each other and she would slap my face and I would have to drag her down the corridors by her hair, and that would be us in a civilized state.

  I left my father’s hall not knowing what to do.

  When I met Elinor later that day in Hell’s library, she knew I was troubled, but I did not want to tell her why. It would scare her. It scared me. I had arrived in Hell with all of my manly body parts. They could most likely be reattached by the healers, but I did not want to take the chance that they could not.

  “Will ye please tell me what is troubling ye, Alfarin?” asked Elinor. We had never ventured this far into the depths of the library before and we were alone, save for a naked old man who was walking up and down the aisles with a ball and chain hanging from his—

  Oh, in the name of the goddess Eli, there are some things that should not be described.

  “My father wishes me to take a wife,” I said glumly.

  “Oh,” replied Elinor, tugging at the back of her neck. “Who?”

  “My father intends to open discussions with your family,” I replied.

  “My family?” replied Elinor. “And do I not get a say in this?”

  “You are a chattel, a possession of your dead brothers, Elinor,” I replied. “This is how it is done. It is how it has always been done.”

  “I am no devil’s possession to give away like a piece of meat. And my brothers in Hell have never given a rat’s arse about me anyway,” snapped Elinor. “I will decide who I marry, not any other devil.”

  “If you decline, you will be seen to have brought dishonor on me and my kin,” I replied.

  “I have become yer friend, Alfarin,” said Elinor. “For now and for always. And perhaps one day it might become more, but I will not marry ye just because some Viking says so, even if he is a king. And if that means I am no longer welcome in yer halls of Valhalla, then so be it.”

  Elinor said no more, and, for once, I was grateful for her taciturnity. I knew what I had to do, as a Viking, a man, a devil.

  “I will not marry Elinor Powell.”

  My statement to the council of Vikings was met with uproar. I was disobeying the wishes of my kin and king. Their angry voices were drowned out by the thumping of their fists and feet on wood. I stood my ground. Elinor did not wish to become my possession. And it would be wrong to try to take her as such. No woman was a possession of a man. Nobody should be the possession of anyone. I knew this, and I also knew that I could not allow Elinor to take the heat of Hell for this decision. I would fall on my blade first.

  “You must take a wife, Alfarin, son of mine!” roared King Hlif. “Saxons, Normans—why, even the Romans are beginning to talk! They speak of my son as if he is soft in the head. All that time spent in the library, consorting with a peasant girl. It isn’t the Viking way.”

  “We are a learned people, Father,” I replied. “Maybe not in the world of words retained in a library, but we are clever nonetheless. You are respected as a wise and benevolent ruler in Hell. I will not marry Elinor Powell, and you cannot force upon me a union which I do not desire. This is my last word on the subject.”

  “Then be gone from my sight!” roared my father. “And I will deal with you later.”

  I knew I had displeased him deeply, and a Viking who displeases his king does not escape punishment easily, even if he happens to be the king’s kin.

  But I would no
t force Elinor into a marriage she did not want. I did not wish to pull Elinor’s hair. I wanted to place flowers in it.

  Later that evening, Elinor gave me her serving of lemon pie, even though it was her favorite. I think she thought she knew what had happened.

  She did not know the half of it.

  My father did not speak to me for three hundred and sixty-five days. And a mark for each day of his silent judgment was scored into my arms with my own blade.

  The wounds themselves did not cause me pain. Nor did my having to wear a long-sleeved tunic to conceal my powerful arms from Elinor for a full year.

  What truly hurt was the knowledge that this was the first time anyone else, dead or alive, had ever dared to use my axe. And it was used against me.

  5. Plan B

  The thick metal vault doors within the reception area open, and as feared, the devils outside the reception area attempt to storm the HBI barricade, which is trying to keep them from escaping Hell.

  “Alfarin, hurry!” cries Elinor as Lord Septimus pushes Mitchell and Medusa through the only entrance to—and exit from—Hell.

  “What is going on?” cries Mitchell. “This didn’t happen last time. There was hardly anyone around last time we tried to leave.”

  Lights are still flashing and sirens are screaming. The sound is not the torturous noise a devil hears when Hell’s lockdown alarm is activated, but it is true screaming. High-pitched and terrible.

  “That’s a Banshee!” cries Medusa. “It has to be! Nothing living makes that sound.”

  “But we are not living, M,” replies Elinor, pulling at my arm. “And ye don’t know what a Banshee sounds like. This screaming could be anyone or anything. Quickly, Alfarin. Ye must hurry.”

  The glass doors to the reception area shatter, and a flash of golden light illuminates the cleaved rock corridor beyond the metal vaults as Lord Septimus, Elinor, Mitchell, Medusa and I run through. My axe is vibrating in my hand, but it was not I who broke the glass. There is another sensation, too. A pulsing from the backpack on my shoulder. It is the Viciseometer, the device that has allowed Team DEVIL to travel through time and through realms. It’s letting me know it’s there, waiting, ready to be used.

  The doors shut with a heavy clang, blocking out all sound and light from behind. Red flame bursts forth as Lord Septimus ignites a torch fixed to an iron bracket on the rock wall. The smell of soot lingers.

  “Were you expecting that, Lord Septimus?” I ask. “Mitchell was correct. When we passed through the last time we departed Hell, there were no revolting peasants prepared to storm the reception area.”

  “I was expecting it,” replies Lord Septimus quietly. He has stopped walking, and he seems distracted by the tunnel ahead. It is as if he is searching for something in the darkness.

  Skin-Walkers?

  No one moves. They are waiting for me. My axe is no longer vibrating and the Viciseometer is still once more. I hold out my hand for the flaming torch and Lord Septimus hands it to me.

  We are in for a long walk. I hope Mitchell and Medusa packed ointment for possible chafing.

  “Ye will tell us when ye are going to leave us, Mr. Septimus?” asks Elinor. “So we are prepared?”

  “I will,” he replies in his deep, soothing drawl. “But that will not be for a little while. In fact, if you could indulge some of your time, Miss Powell, would you fall back a little with me? There is something I wish to discuss with you.”

  I cannot help but turn around. Three pale faces light up in the firelight, and Lord Septimus’s shines with a black glow, like a precious opal. He had said he wanted to talk to me—so why is he singling out Elinor?

  “What do you think that’s all about?” whispers Mitchell as we continue onward.

  “Shhh,” hisses Medusa. “I’m trying to listen.”

  “If Lord Septimus wanted us to be party to the conversation, he would have asked,” I say indignantly. “Privacy is a sacred state.”

  And then I stop talking, for I wish to hear, too. Alas, Lord Septimus and Elinor keep their voices low. A heavy foreboding beaches itself on my shoulders. I can sense a change in the air, and I do not like it. Team DEVIL is different since our journeys to the land of the living.

  And Elinor is different since The Devil took her to filter his dreams. I sense that I am losing her all over again, and I do not know how to get her back. We have been friends for so long, but it feels to me as if the bonds of trust and loyalty that took us hundreds of years to forge were crushed in one fell swoop by The Devil. I understand that she may not be able to share with me everything she witnessed in the mind of that blackhearted monster, but she never used to be secretive. And there is something else, too, that I’ve only been able to identify now. Elinor is . . . distant. I can see it in her eyes. They still betray the red heat of over three centuries of death, but the glow that once danced there has gone.

  The windows of her soul have died. The Devil has done what the Great Fire of London in 1666 could not. He has destroyed her spirit.

  My father once wanted me to take Elinor as my wife. I refused and I was punished. Every day, for three hundred and sixty-five days, my father scored a line of penance into my skin with my own axe. In spite of the humiliation, my soul was never broken. It never even came close. What horrors did Elinor see in The Devil’s dreams? What degradation was she dragged through as his Dreamcatcher?

  “Alfarin?”

  “Yes, my friend?”

  “You have a Plan B, don’t you? In case something goes wrong in there . . . ?”

  “Mitchell, I will not fail.”

  “I know. I’m just saying—”

  “I will not fail.”

  “No, Alfarin. Listen. What I’m saying is, you have the Viciseometer. So if you need to, use it. Get Elinor away. The two of you can go anywhere in time.”

  The meaning of Mitchell’s words washes over me and I am nearly overcome with emotion. I pat him on the shoulder and his knees buckle. For someone so tall, he has the muscle mass of an old lady. If he had been a Viking, Mitchell would have been used as a spare oar on the longship.

  Yet his heart is ten times the size of mine. I would not be surprised to find life in it still. Mitchell forsook his chance to change his death in order to do right by Team DEVIL. Very few would have been so selfless. He is doing the same now, and it comes to him as easily as breathing comes to the living. Mitchell is the most honorable, decent man—and friend—I know.

  “Mitchell, I will not fail,” I repeat for the third time. If I say it often enough, I might believe it.

  “Okay, man. Okay,” Mitchell whispers. “It’s just that, if things go wrong—and let’s face it, Team DEVIL does have a reputation for screwing up—I want you to promise me something.”

  “Anything for you, my friend.”

  “Get Elinor out of Hell, and go find my brother. Keep him hidden until he’s too old to be taken.”

  “Mitchell,” gasps Medusa.

  “He’ll still be on the list of future Dreamcatchers, Medusa,” says Mitchell. “I’m not having him put back in danger because we messed up.”

  “I wasn’t disagreeing,” replies Medusa gently. “I think it’s a great idea.”

  “A Plan B,” I say, frowning.

  “Promise me, Alfarin?” asks Mitchell, and the urgency in his voice gnaws at me. “We need to have a Plan B. The Devil can’t take me or Medusa as his Dreamcatcher because we aren’t pure enough, but he could take back Elinor. And he will—we all know that’s what he’s planning on doing if we fail in there. I bet anything that’s what Septimus is talking to her about now. So we don’t give him the chance, okay? If we fail to convince Beatrice Morrigan to return with us, then you don’t think twice. You and Elinor go back to Washington, DC, to that first time we saw my brother, and you take him.”

  “But your lady mother—”

  “My mom will get him back eventually. You just take care of him until he’s past the age of five and too old to be used as a Dreamc
atcher. I’m begging you, Alfarin. Please.”

  “Oh, Mitchell,” whispers Medusa. She wraps her bony arms around his waist and hugs him while we are still walking.

  “But Plan B means leaving the two of you to the fate of the Skin-Walkers,” I say.

  “Septimus will look out for us,” says Medusa.

  But she cannot see the sideways glance of Mitchell’s pink eyes, nor the fact that he is biting down on his bottom lip. He wraps his arms around Medusa and quickly kisses the crown of her head. Her curls smother his face. Mitchell subtly shakes his head from left to right to left, and I understand the wordless gesture.

  We cannot rely on Lord Septimus to put us first. Not now. We are pawns in a much bigger game. The Devil has made his number one general look foolish. There will be no forgiveness by the servant of the master once Lord Septimus decides to strike back.

  “I promise, my friend, to do as you ask,” I say. “Let us prepare for the blood oath.”

  “Again?” asks Mitchell. “Um. Okay. Can I do it? I know you don’t like anyone touching your axe, but . . . I don’t know, it just seems like it should come from me this time. Because of M.J.”

  Lord Septimus and Elinor have drawn level with us once more. Mitchell takes my axe from my hands. It does not feel natural to see someone else bear its mighty weight, and yet what Mitchell is about to do makes perfect sense. I am proud he has asked me for this honor.

  “Across the palm,” I say, holding my scarred hand flat. “Straight and true.”

  The cut that Mitchell inflicts on me is not as deep as I would have done to myself, but thick blood still seeps through the opening in my skin.

  “Yer axe has seen more of Team DEVIL’s blood than it should,” says Elinor. The tone of her voice carries the full weight of her displeasure. “Are ye sure this is necessary?”