Chapter 11
It turned out plain old, human-made chocolate chip cookies were the key to greasing just about any wheels out in the Siberian wildlands.
After the attack on Audrey’s apartment building, she and Gunnar spent two days hiding out in the ESC slums before reconnecting with Theo. The archivist proved worth his salt again. Once they’d decided as a group Nizhny Bestyakh was their best option, he got them out of the Eastern Seaboard Conjunct himself—on dragon back. His back, as it turned out.
Theo didn’t want to make a show when they arrived, so they’d landed a few stops earlier on the Trans-Siberian railway and then rode it to the ass-end. Once in Nizhny, Theo made the introductions to Rina. He left on the train out the next morning.
Rina put Gunnar to work immediately, setting him and Audrey up with temporary lodging at the town center, an impressive train station that had survived well over two hundred years of calamities and hard winters. While Gunnar hunted, Audrey rooted out ways to be useful to the community, starting with cookies.
After getting permission to use the tavern kitchen from Aster, the cornflower wraith who ran the place, she baked for days, insisting that first impressions mattered. Gunnar knew she didn’t want to be a burden. Audrey had learned everyone’s name by day two, and by the end of the first week, Gunnar was escorting her around the settlement to hand out baked goods.
They were met with amusement or confusion, bewilderment, and in one case, hostility. An Aperien harpy named Celaeno acted as Rina’s scoutmaster, and had set herself up in a rundown electrical pump house on Nizhny’s west side. Reputation preceded Celaeno; she hated everyone and wanted to be left in isolation, enjoyed throwing out hexes at those who bothered her. Audrey insisted on paying her a visit, unwilling to treat anyone unfairly.
Rina joined them, shouted out a greeting and warning, and then she and Gunnar hung back while Audrey trotted up to deliver the baked goods. Everyone walked away with their skin intact. Audrey’s only comment as they walked back to the town center had been that Celaeno “seemed nice, but maybe a little bit lonely.”
Gunnar watched her now as she carefully removed the eyes from the third dragon head, gloved hands steady despite being covered in viscera.
She hadn’t stopped with the cookies, dedicating all her free time to studying local mythos and struggling to learn Russian. She handled their trade, keeping their books beyond Gunnar’s quotas, and had helped others in town maximize their profits after learning how to best preserve the various bits and pieces used for profitable alchemical ingredients. Rina said her efforts helped get the train coming four times a month instead of three. Exports were up that much since their arrival.
All of which was fantastic. Everything was, really. Gunnar had never found himself more at ease. The beast in his blood was content; he hunted most days, brought in kills that kept his territory clear and he and Audrey beyond well-fed. There was a brothel at the station for when his baser urges clawed up, and he’d garnered the respect of his fellow hunters.
He’d never had an obvious purpose before, always on the run, just trying to make it through the day. Gunnar found he enjoyed the simplicity of sleeping in the same place each night and not worrying where his next meal would come from.
There was really only one problem, and he was staring at her right now.
Gunnar, now he belonged in a town filled with dangerous creatures, way out on the fringes of civilization. Deserved it really, given who and what he was. Hells, he was thankful. He wasn’t buried in some cell, rotting underground and barely alive. He was free, more than.
But it shouldn’t have cost Audrey everything.
He frowned a bit. Her nose was pink from the cold where it poked out of her scarf, her brows knit in concentration as she put the eye into a vial filled with a preserving agent. When she finished, she hummed and nodded to herself, then screwed the lid on before she caught him watching her. She blinked at him, hazel eyes bright in the fading sunlight.
“Do you need help?”
Gunnar chuckled; he was elbows deep in the chest cavity, fishing after the zmei’s second heart. “Nah,” he drawled, catching the concern in her scent. They’d learned each other in the last few months, living and working together in such proximity. She’d worry too quick, so he shrugged and offered, “Just realized you never told me where you learned to make those cookies.”
He could tell she grinned under the scarf, with the way the skin crinkled a little around her eyes. “Oh, from Whistelae, the healer who took on my fosterage after they released me from the hospital. Her mother was human.”
Gunnar extracted a few more ribs and tossed them in the growing pile for smoking. “Druid, right? Odd place for them to turn up.”
Audrey nodded, back to eyeball grabbing, and he relaxed with her attention off him. “She came from the Coalition for a teaching exchange, which was how I met Theodore, actually. He acts as a liaison sometimes.”
“Heard from him at all?”
“No. He told me not to expect anything, but I’d hoped . . .” Audrey sighed. “It’s safer this way.”
Meaning how Audrey was assumed dead.
The ESC had blared the headlines about her death. The terrorism of it, media speculating if Gunnar himself had opened a hells gate with his demonic blood to pay her back for her good deeds. Seemed like fearmongering didn’t require even basic knowledge about vilebloods, just whatever made the best story bait.
Gunnar’d expected some pushback from Theo when he’d told the archivist he planned on taking her with him, maybe more lectures about gratitude or his manners, but he’d agreed it was the right call. It was strange to lockstep with the good guys, but whatever bastard he was, Gunnar knew the math.
Audrey lost everything for him this time around, and fuck if he’d leave her hanging, not after she’d dedicated her life to his freedom.
He wasn’t sure how he’d clear the debt, and it bothered him, day after day.
He figured the best start was saving up enough trade to get Audrey her own place, remove that forced sort of dependence she had on him. She’d been doing just fine for herself outside the hunting quota he took care of in exchange for both their Nizhny residences.
Maybe there was some secret magic in those cookies, he thought with a chuckle but dismissed the thought as quick as it crept up.
It was really just her.
Just Audrey, this human girl who deserved far, far better than being tied to a monster like him for the rest of her life.
“This might be enough to push us over,” Gunnar said, cutting the heart loose and setting it on the table. He let her handle the more delicate work; she had steady hands and smaller fingers. “Could get you set up in your own place in the station instead of all the way out here.”
Audrey’s movements stalled. She tried to cover it by setting aside the knife and cleaning her hands. “Oh?”
“Said yourself, dragon bits are a big deal.”
“Zmei,” she corrected, grabbing some cured leather to wrap the hearts. “I guess we’ll see after the next two train days? No rush really,” she added, avoiding eye contact now.
Gunnar leaned against the table while she tied off the bundles. “Thought you were excited about getting a new place?”
“Sure, but I figured . . .” Audrey fiddled with the string. “I enjoy being close to Lyubava. I could babysit the babies. No, the cubs, I mean.” She laughed, waved a hand. “And we share the trade and work, so it seems silly to drag corpses all the way into town, right?”
“Not that far of a walk. We could do the grunt work up here.” Gunnar rubbed his chin, skin cold. They’d need to take a break inside soon; she shouldn’t be out so long in the cold, even with the open fire furnace running on the deck and the smoker chugging away. “Figured you’d be happier with your own space.”
“Oh, I’m not bothered by sharing space.” She waved a hand again, wandering around their work area like she suddenly couldn’t figure out what to do with herself.
“Inside,” he ordered, snatching up the gear too valuable to leave outside.
She nodded and followed suit. Gunnar sighed when they stepped into the cabin’s warmth, pulling down his scarf, and kicked the packed snow off his boots before he shut the door behind them. He inhaled, long and deep, her soft scent all over everything.
The cabin wasn’t much, built in a rush before winter set the ground hard. Rina wanted Gunnar helping with Nizhny’s next expansion over the dark months. The foot print wasn’t bigger than that apartment Audrey had back in the ESC, but it was nicer by a thousand miles.
Stone pine had a mild scent Gunnar appreciated, the log cabin walls rustic and easy on the eyes. They’d imported the windows, the soft tint warming the lighting in the large sitting room that doubled as her little library. They each had their own bedroom, along with a rather modern shared bathroom, complete with a copper tub and shower, and kitchen.
A drop door led into the basement, a stone-sealed cellar that doubled as a workshop and storage facility for their trade between train days. It also housed the boiler, which connected to enchanted piping that ran all the way back to Nizhny’s town center.
Another wheel greased by cookies. The town smith, a dvergar—not to be ever called a dwarf, not if you valued your balls—who only went by E, was a notorious grump despite his skills, and apparently with a previously undiscovered obsession with human baked goods.
According to Rina, they should have been chopping wood for heat and boiling their own water through the winter, but E had been unexpectedly cooperative about running and enchanting the pipes before the hard freeze. And a week after they’d moved into the new place, Audrey had a passing conversation with Aster one night in the tavern. She was all apologies for the latest batch of cookies being overdone, muttering about wooden stoves baking unevenly.
Not even two days later, an enchanted Dutch oven, the perfect size for a dozen cookies and magically primed maintain the perfect baking temperature indefinitely, appeared on their doorstep with a hastily scrawled, unsigned note about the importance of settlement morale during the long winter season.
Gunnar was certain if Audrey wanted, she’d be welcome at the train station proper. Hells, E would probably make some excuse about connecting her kitchen directly to his forge if it got him more of her cookies.
Now Gunnar wouldn’t enjoy being further away from her, unable to check in on her whenever he felt the itch, but the train station was one hells of a step up from a cabin on the fringes. She’d never whispered a single complaint, though, not in all the time they’d been here. Far as he could tell, she was fine with their situation, happy even, and he really couldn’t understand why.
She should want more. She deserved it. If anyone fucking did, it was her.
Instead, she was here with him, shaking snow off her furs and hanging them near the furnace to dry, washing her hands and setting up tea for herself, coffee for him, and lunch for them both.
He’d push more later. Talk her into what she deserved, Gunnar decided, inhaling again as her content scent of sunshine permeated the room.
Audrey went about her day, humming a song they’d heard last train day from a traveling music troupe. He basked in the moment and pretended he deserved it, maybe even earned it by keeping her safe.
At the very least, he’d take it. He’d always been a greedy bastard; it was in his blood.