Decimation, p.8
Decimation, page 8
I wanted to argue, but she wasn’t in the right frame of mind to hear me.
Magnus’s nostrils flared. “Fuck you. I’m going to take a shower.” She stormed from the room.
Unbelievable. I flopped back into bed, and let anger and frustration fill me. How was I supposed to make her understand?
What if she was right? That doubting part of my mind that she’d called out was ready to take her side.
Right about what? Bragi was dangerous. I left him because of what he became.
What if he’d changed?
People didn’t change.
He had. Decades had passed like minutes, and one day…
When he started working with Vidar… Hel… Morganna… Loki… The others… He was the man I loved. His empathy meant he found joy in bringing joy to others. He bought into Vidar’s sales pitch, because it was one of a utopia, similar to the picture Vidar tried to paint for us yesterday.
As Bragi was at that fucking school, day after day, feeling the results of the training, it gnawed at him. He wasn’t silent about it. He argued with Hel and Vidar. Pointed out that their methods were the cruelest sort of indoctrination.
I watched it all devour him. As with so much of my past, this fresh hindsight provided a perspective I didn’t have when I lived it. Back then what I saw was a man who was angrier than I remembered. Meaner.
And at some point, I’d realized he’d stopped caring.
No. Worse. he delighted in the suffering of those around him.
That was when I’d left. When I woke up one day and realized that it wasn’t joy that kept him going anymore, it was agony. Dining on the pain he was fed on a non-stop basis.
I couldn’t let that happen to Magnus. I couldn’t watch a slow decline into that form of madness. Bragi should’ve taken steps back then to stop Vidar, but I could do so now. I could help her. I could stop wallowing.
I was lost in the reverie long enough that I didn’t hear the water shut off. When Magnus emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, she still wore a frown that etched deep lines in her forehead.
“It’s a little late for retrospection, and you’re still wrong.” Her anger hadn’t faded. She grabbed some clothes from drawers, and vanished into the little room again.
When she came out again a few minutes later, this time dressed, she didn’t so much as glance at me as she left the room.
Was it possible to give her space with her able to feel everything I did? Wondering that didn’t stop the questions from bouncing in my head as I got ready for the day as well.
I joined her in the kitchen a short while later. She had made coffee, and was leaning against a far counter sipping from a mug with a cartoon unicorn, who appeared to have a rainbow coming from its rear.
I didn’t realize Magnus had been to those parties.
She glanced at me, and put several meters of distance between herself and the coffee maker.
Were we going to not talk now? That was unacceptable. “I—”
“Stop.” She bit off the word. “You’re not sorry—why the fuck are men never sorry?—and I already know the rest. I don’t want to listen to you work your way through it out loud.”
While I understood what she meant, it wasn’t a good approach. “That’s going to make it difficult to resolve this.”
“There’s nothing to resolve. You don’t get to tell me what to do or who to speak with, and I don’t listen when you try.”
My frustration was back.
“Good.” She huffed.
There was a knock, and Dahlia called out, “Are you decent?”
Magnus and I weren’t done. “No,” I shouted.
At the same time Magnus said, “Yes.”
Dahlia pushed into the apartment. “Magnus wins.” She paused in the entryway and looked between us. “What did you do, Nico?”
“Why would I have done anything?” I understood next to nothing about their language.
“He tried to tell me what to do,” Magnus offered.
Dahlia rolled her eyes. “Asshole.”
This felt similar to the argument she had with Fen last night, but without the playfulness.
“Fight later?” Dahlia crossed the room to the island that separated the kitchen from the rest of the room, and set her laptop on the counter and opened the lid. “You have to see this.”
“Gladly.” Magnus joined her.
I let my frustration flow, along with the spite that told me to do so, and observed from where I stood.
I listened to a woman talk about what a server farm was. This seemed like an odd topic for Dahlia to be worked up over. I understood she and Magnus were tech savvy, but—
“One has gone missing—” the woman on the computer said.
What? I moved closer, to see the screen. The argument with Magnus evaporated from my thoughts, as the person with the news said that a large block of UWS computers—Ubiquity Web Services—had vanished into thin air. As in, hundreds of acres were just… gone.
Even with the explanation, I barely understood the technology aspect, but I recognized that this was a bad thing.
“Is she fucking serious?” Magnus sounded stunned.
Dahlia gave a bark of a laugh. “Yes. I went there the instant I heard”—She held up a finger when Magnus opened her mouth—“for about two seconds. Long enough to confirm for myself. It’s not hidden. It’s not there but in a different realm. It’s gone.”
“Fuck.” Magnus sank onto a stool next to Dahlia.
I needed to understand more. “What kind of impact does this have?”
The unfocused look Magnus gave me was far from the irritation that had been there moments ago. “It causes chaos. It draws a huge amount of attention to the fact that people can do this. It has the potential to send thousands of companies and people into a tailspin as they scramble to recover archives and restore online business portals.”
“It was the series of servers where we had our magical book repository,” Dahlia added. “I had been working on identifying which old texts were based on the originals, and archiving them. I have backups, but my most recent work is gone.”
“More important is what it could do.” Magnus picked up the story. “One of Dahlia’s strengths is the ability to blend magic with tech, and she’s created a system that finds.”
“Finds what?” I asked.
Dahlia spun to face me. “People. Things. Whatever I tweak the code to make it do. The only reason Vidar gave a shit who I was before my dragon woke up. He can do that magically, but the software magnifies it. It reaches out and… touches things, for lack of a better word.
“We believe this is Vidar who did this?”
“Not any other gods making gestures like this these days.” Magnus was pale.
I wanted to be able to wrap my brain around the magnitude of this event, but the women’s reactions filled in what my knowledge couldn’t. “We need to find out why he did this, unless one of you knows.”
“We can guess, but no. This is… No.” Magnus gave a rough shake of her head, and the glazed-over look she wore vanished. “You’re right. We need answers.”
“Frey is talking to Aya. To see what thoughts she has.” Dahlia sounded as though she’d reset too.
Magnus stood on the bottom rung of her stool, to reach across the counter and grab her phone. “I’ll call Min.”
I would stand back and watch.
Several gods had adapted to technology, but any that I’d learned to use had been reluctantly.
This was ridiculous. I was an ancient and powerful being, and I was cooling my heels while the people around me worked to keep their lives and their world from crumbling. I needed to do something. Train with them. Fight with them. Bring my own skills back up to snuff.
Keep Magnus—all of them—from falling prey to Vidar. I hadn’t stopped Bragi. I’d pushed him away rather than helping him, and couldn’t make that right. This was a place I could make a difference, though.
Frey walked into the apartment while Magnus was still on the phone. Dahlia offered him a tight smile and he kissed her on the forehead.
“Nico.” He gave me a nod. “I may know something, but not much,” he said quietly.
A moment later, Magnus said, “Okay. That sounds good. Thank you. Yeah, we’ll keep you posted.” She set her phone down and gave us her attention. “You first,” she said to Frey.
The way Frey rested his hand on Dahlia’s leg, and she leaned into him was so natural. Sweet. “Aya didn’t know much. She agreed it was probably Vidar. There are others who might do something like this, but she doesn’t think they have the power to vanish an entire building full of hardware. She doesn’t have any better guess to what Vidar would be up to than Dahlia’s tech, but she did say there was someone who might.”
“Who?” I asked.
Frey frowned and shook his head. “She’s only heard rumors that there’s someone out there who deals in magical tech, but she’s never been able to find out more.”
“Min gave me a name.” Magnus leaned in. “Most of what he said was the same, but he added a bit more. He can see that there are pieces of his domain that were relocated magically before this happened. Someone went out of their way to make sure his websites didn’t go offline.”
“What kind of websites does Min have?” I couldn’t fathom what a fertility god was doing with an internet presence.
Magnus smirked. “Porn.”
Oh. Perhaps I should have guessed as much.
“Which backs up his theory that Vindres was involved,” Magnus said.
Frey let out a sigh-growl at the name. “I suppose that would make sense.”
Dahlia screwed up her face. “Is that the— No. Really?”
“According to Min, that’s him,” Magnus confirmed.
This time I understood the conversation. Vindres was an incubus. He ran a club that some compared to NEON, and it was certainly a den of iniquity and a haven for immortals and supernatural beings. But Vindres tended to focus more on debauchery and less on consent.
He was also heavily involved in concepts a lot of magical beings preferred not to deal with themselves. The digital world was on that list. “Bragi knows him. Reluctant friends.” I couldn’t believe I was bringing him up.
“I can talk to him,” Magnus said.
No one else seemed bothered by this suggestion. In fact, Dahlia was nodding.
“Why you?” I wanted to know.
Her scowl was back as she stared me down. “It was what I specialized in at TOM. We called it honey pot interrogation.”
“You?” I was familiar with the concept. One of Bragi’s.
“You’re surprised I have skills?” The edge slid into Magnus’s voice.
I didn’t want to fight. Not about this. Not about her staying away from Bragi. “I know you have skill, but I don’t know what they all are. I’d like to learn that about you. In this case, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best.”
“Why not?” Dahlia asked.
“Vindres is paranoid. Rather, he was two centuries ago, and I doubt that’s diminished. He won’t talk to anyone without an introduction, including a gorgeous redheaded Valkyrie. Do you know him, Frey?”
Frey shook his head. “By reputation. Never had an interest in meeting him.”
“I can’t imagine him seeing Magnus. You can try.”
She clenched her jaw. “No. There’s no try here. If I don’t get in the first time, I don’t suspect I get a second chance.”
“Then we need to find another place for information.” Dahlia sounded defeated.
It wasn’t the next step any of us wanted, but at least it was a next step.
TEN
MAGNUS
I was still furious at Nico for believing he had the right to tell me where I could and couldn’t go, and that was amplified by the fact that he wasn’t sure he was still upset at Bragi.
As if he was punishing me for his indecision.
But I planned to forgive him as soon as he realized he was wrong, and there were more important things to focus on right now. For instance, who could help us figure out why Vidar took an entire data storage warehouse.
“I can make some more calls,” Frey said. “Fen and I have a few names we can reach out to, and Aya said she would do the same.”
I wanted to talk to this incubus Nico and Frey mentioned. If that meant approaching him with Bragi, so be it. The only reason I wasn’t pursuing that now, was because I didn’t want to shut down any options, and if I walked out right now to talk to Bragi, I might not discover what our other choices were.
Dahlia and Nico were right before—this was too important to jump into without thought, and Vidar was too dangerous to ignore any possibilities.
I had an idea, though it wasn’t one I wanted to pursue. When I met Maeve, we’d talked about a lot of things in the hours while Bragi recovered. Including the fact that she’d given Vidar a great deal of information over the decades.
She’d assured me quickly that she did so before she realized what he was, and I understood, because I’d fallen for his bullshit too.
Why couldn’t we afford Bragi the same?
Because that situation was more complicated. Bragi’s sins weren’t his collaboration.
The problem asking Maeve for information about Vidar was that she hadn’t been forthcoming the first time we touched on the subject. She said she’d helped him, that she regretted it, and that she continued to refuse help each time he asked.
She had repeatedly changed the subject when I tried to go back to the topic of him, though. Asking her again seemed unlikely to yield any new answers, and if it pissed her off, we may not be able to turn to her in the future.
Which meant risking pissing off Maeve. If we didn’t stop Vidar, there was a chance none of us would live long enough to need her help again anyway. What a shitty, sobering thought.
“I may know someone with answers,” I said. “Maeve.”
Frey raised his brows. He knew the name?
“Are you going to follow the same ritual Bragi did?” Nico stumbled on the name, but his hesitation was mostly emotional. He was conflicted.
Then again, so was I on the matter of Bragi. The longer I lived in this condition, the more I understood— “I’d rather not spend that much time on it. I will go alone, though.”
Nico opened his mouth, and I stared him down, daring him to object. He wanted to. He was struggling with the impulse. “We need to talk before you go.”
About the disagreement. About Bragi. “No.”
“You can’t go during the day.” Frey wasn’t trying to stop me. I felt that he was being reasonable about this.
“Why not?” I had to admit, sometimes this empathy thing came in handy. If I couldn’t tell that Frey was being reasonable where Nico was being controlling, I would’ve snapped at both of them.
I’d forgotten more of my training than I realized. Or maybe I’d clung more tightly to the negative bits of my upbringing—like the inability to trust and take things at face value.
“The magic that keeps Maeve’s realm hidden is similar to what I use on NEON,” Frey said. “The wards bind multiple places into a seemingly single space. But for her, the connection doesn’t exist in the daylight. If you go out there now, you’ll only find Montana.”
Dahlia studied him, leaking curiosity. “How do you know that?”
“I know Maeve.” Frey made it sound like the most natural and casual of statements.
Dahlia jutted her lower lip out so far the pout was comical. “How come everyone knows Queen Mab but me?”
“I’ll introduce you when this is all over.” Or I would as long as Maeve was still speaking to me after tonight.
Frey tsked and shook his head. “Promise me you won’t call her that to her face.”
“Fine.” Dahlia’s huff was exaggerated.
Not fine. I understood Frey’s explanation, but, “What am I supposed to do until tonight?”
Nico opened his mouth.
“Practice what you did with Vidar.” Dahlia talked over him.
Thank fuck for Dahlia. “I don’t know how I did it,” I said.
Frey squeezed Dahlia’s knee and stood. “Was it an accident? Did it just happen?” His questions were curious, looking for answers rather than accusing.
“No but yes? I intentionally looked for his power to draw on, but I don’t know what happened after that. I doubt his interference helped.” Looking back was uncomfortable. Everyone else’s powers and emotions were memories, but mine were more tangible and real, still living near the surface—
Oh. Was this what Bragi had been trying to get me to see?
I tucked the thought aside to examine it later.
“If that’s what you have, that’s where you start.” Frey gave Dahlia a quick kiss. “I’m going to make more calls and see what Aya found. Sparring room is open.” He squeezed my hand. “Be careful. You two get stupid when you’re angry. Don’t get stupid.”
I didn’t appreciate the advice, but the affection underneath softened his words. Besides, it was possible he was right.
Frey left.
“Do you want to change?” Dahlia asked.
Part of our training growing up was learning to fight in any type of clothing, so we were prepared regardless of where we were. If I was allowed to choose though, I’d always choose comfortable clothes for working out—regardless of whether it was physical or magical training. “Yeah. Meet you next door?”
Frey had a doorway in their apartment that opened into an amazing training gym. There were mats for grappling, training dummies that could stand up to various magics, and a massive outdoor space for workouts that required more room.
“Five minutes.” Dahlia hopped from her stool. “We can start small, and you can add in what Bragi taught you last night.”
