He took a seat and I sat across from him. Curran joined me. The vampire tried to follow but a large woman in chain mail barred his way.
A girl half my age swept by and slammed two giant tankards filled with beer on the table. Ragnvald held his up. I smashed my tankard against his. Beer splashed. We raised the tankard and pretended to take much bigger gulps than we actually did.
Curran drank his beer. Apparently, my taking the lead meant he went mute.
The young woman sashayed over to Ascanio and Derek and led them to a neighboring table. Judging by how hard her hips were working, she was open for business.
“So, what brings you to our mead hall?”
“I’m looking for Dagfinn.”
Ragnvald grimaced. “What has he done now?”
“Just got some weird runes I need him to translate for me.”
Ragnvald spread his arms. “We haven’t seen the man. You should talk to Helga about the runes.”
I had made some calls this morning. “We did talk to Helga. Talked to Dorte and old man Rasmus, too. They can’t help us. Dagfinn is our best lead for now.”
A huge older man staggered into the hall. Thick through the shoulders and slabbed with what my adoptive father had called hard fat, he moved in that peculiar careful way drunks do when they have trouble putting one foot in front of the other and don’t want to pitch over. His leather vest sat askew on his large frame, his face was ruddy from cold or too much booze, and his long graying hair hung down in two braids, tangling with a mess of a gray beard.
It’s all fun and games until the drunk Viking Santa shows up.
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Ragnvald drank a tiny swallow of his beer. “He isn’t here. We expelled him months ago.”
“Is that so?” Curran said.
“It is,” Ragnvald insisted.
The soused Saint Nick zeroed in on the vampire sitting on the floor by the table where the shapeshifters were looking at their beer. The drunk blinked his bleary eyes and shambled toward the vamp.
“I hear the Guild is having a meeting soon,” Ragnvald said.
“That’s what I’ve been told,” I said.
The older Viking pointed at the vampire. “What is this shit?”
Nobody answered.
Santa upped his voice a notch. “What is this shit?”
“Settle down, Dad,” a younger man said from the corner.
Santa pivoted to the speaker. “Don’t tell me to settle down, you stupid son of a whore.”
“You don’t talk about Mom that way.”
“I’ll talk about her…I’ll…what is this shit?”
“I also hear that the Pack has been called in to mediate.” Ragnvald looked at me for a long moment so I’d register that it was important.
“Aha.”
“We have fifteen full-time members in the Guild,” Ragnvald said.
I nodded. “I know. You put in what, eight years?”
“Seven and some change.”
Santa rocked back, took a deep breath, and spat on the vamp.
Awesome. “Are you going to do anything about that?”
Ragnvald glanced over his shoulder. “That’s Johan. He’s just having a bit of fun. About the mediation, Kate.”
“What about it?”
The vamp unhinged his maw. “Only a fool fights with drunks and idiots,” Ghastek’s voice said.
“Are you calling me an idiot?” Johan squinted at the vamp.
People at the other tables stopped eating and trickled over to watch closer. They smelled a fight coming and didn’t want to miss the show. This wasn’t going well.
The vampire shrugged, mimicking Ghastek’s gesture. “If a certain drunk spits on my vampire again, he will regret it.”
Johan leaned back, a puzzled expression on his face. Apparently, Ghastek had managed to stump him.
“Which way are you leaning?” Ragnvald said.
Nice try. “Where is Dagfinn, Ragnvald?”
“I’ve told you twice now, he isn’t here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. His house is here, his mother still lives here, and his stallion is out in the pasture.”
“He gave him to his mother,” Ragnvald said.
“He gave Magnus to his mother?”
“Yes.”
“That horse is a bloody beast. Nobody can ride him except Dagfinn. The only reason Magnus hasn’t bitten Dagfinn’s hand off by now is because every time he tries, Dagfinn bites him back. And you’re telling me Dagfinn gave him to his mother? What is she going to do with him?”
Ragnvald spread his arms. “I don’t know, use him for home protection or something. I’m not a psychic. I don’t know what goes through that man’s head.”
“You mean me?” Johan roared. “You mean I’ll regret it?”
Oh no. He finally got it.
“Do you see any other fat old drunks making a spectacle of themselves?” Ascanio asked.
Johan swung over to Derek. “You! Slap a muzzle on your girlfriend.”
Derek smiled. It was a slow, controlled baring of teeth. I fought a shudder. The couple of guys to the left of us grabbed their chairs.
“Derek, we’re guests,” I called out.
Curran chuckled quietly to himself. Apparently he found me amusing.
“They need a lesson in hospitality,” Ghastek said.
“I’ll show you hospitality.” Johan sucked in some air.
“Don’t do it,” Ghastek warned.
Johan hacked. The gob of spit landed on the vamp’s forehead.
“Suck on that!” Johan pivoted to Derek. “You’re next!”
Ascanio shot from his seat in a blur and punched Johan off his feet. Vikings swarmed. Someone screamed. A chair flew above us and crashed into the wall. Grendel bounced in place, barking his head off.
Ragnvald heaved an exasperated sigh. “Which way are you leaning, Kate? Veterans or Mark?”
“Are you going to tell me where Dagfinn is?”
“No.”
Bastard. “Then I guess I don’t know which way I’m leaning.”
Ragnvald looked at Curran. “Seriously?”
Curran shrugged his broad shoulders. “It’s her show.”
A tankard hurtled through the room and crashed against Ragnvald’s back. He surged to his feet roaring. “Alright, you fuckers, who threw that?”
The second tankard took him straight in the forehead. He staggered and lunged into the full-out brawl raging in the middle of the mead hall. Fists flew, people growled, and above it all, Ghastek’s vamp crawled up the wall to the ceiling, its left paw gripping pissed-off Johan by his ankle.
I sighed, jumped on the table, and kicked some Viking in the face.
My butt hurt, because a Viking woman had kicked me from behind while I was busy, and the motion of my horse wasn’t doing me any favors. The red spot on my shoulder promised to bloom into a baseball-sized bruise, but other than that I’d gotten away scot-free. Derek sported a cut across his chest and Ascanio, whose shirt had somehow gotten mysteriously ripped to shreds in the heat of the battle, was black-and-blue from the neck down. It wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours and by the evening the lot of them would look like new, while I would still be nursing a sore shoulder. Shapeshifters.
The wind brought a whiff of hops from Ghastek’s vamp loping next to me. The Vikings had tried to drown it in the barrel of beer and most of its green sunblock had come off, so Ghastek had ended up rolling him in some mud to keep the skin damage to a minimum. The mud had dried to a nasty crust and the vamp looked like something that would come out of Grendel’s tail end.
Grendel had spent most of the fight barking and biting random people and was now smeared with someone’s vomit.
Curran had escaped unscathed, mostly because when people tried to assault him, he punched them once and then they didn’t get up. He walked now next to my horse in his human form, a big smile on his face.
“What?” I asked him.
“Good thing you took the lead on that one,” he said. “It could’ve gone badly and degenerated into a huge brawl.”
“Screw you.”
“Oh, I hope you do, baby.”
In your dreams.
“And that’s why I don’t like visiting the neo-Vikings,” Ghastek said, his voice dry. “They’re an uncivilized, idiotic lot and nothing good ever comes from it.”
“They started it,” Ascanio said.
“Of course they started it,” I growled. “They’re Vikings. That’s what they do.”
Ghastek cleared his throat. “I can’t help but point out that now Dagfinn knows we’re looking for him. He may go into hiding.”
“Dagfinn doesn’t do hiding. If he isn’t involved in this mess, he’ll show up on my doorstep demanding to know what’s going on. If he is involved, he’ll show up on my doorstep, waving his axe and trying to crush skulls. Works either way.”
“So we wait?”
It made me grit my teeth. I’d hoped we’d get a hold of Dagfinn today. Roderick was running out of time, but there wasn’t anything else we could do. “We go home and wait.”
CHAPTER 6
We parted ways with Ghastek and the four of us—Curran, Derek, Ascanio, and I—made our way back to the Keep. Jim waited for us on the stone steps as we rode into the courtyard.
“What happened to you?”
“We went to see the Vikings,” I told him.
“This is nothing,” Curran said. “You should’ve seen what happened to the vampire.”
Jim smiled.
I dismounted and gave The Dude’s reigns to a shapeshifter kid from the stables.
“Some people are here to see you,” Jim told me.
“What people?”
“From the Guild.”
Argh. “Fine. How’s the boy?”
“Doolittle says he’s the same. Your guests are in the second-floor conference room, third door on the left.”