Slander (Raiders of Valhalla: Prospects #1)

Prologue

Njal

Seven Years Ago…

The judge's mouth is moving, and the words are coming out in the wrong order.

I watch his lips make shapes, and the shapes turn into sound, and the sound travels across the courtroom too slow, like it has to wade through water to reach me.

Not guilty.

He says it once. He says it again. He says it a third time, one for each man, and each time the room makes a noise around me—a breath, a rustle, somewhere behind me a woman crying—and none of it makes me feel any better.

Not guilty.

I turn the words over, and they don't fit. They're the wrong size.

They belong to somebody else, some other man who didn't drive to that warehouse with the thing in his hand, some innocent man who'd feel the floor go soft under him with relief right about now.

I'm not him.

I know what I did.

I know it the way I know my own name, except my name's been feeling strange in my mouth for months too, so maybe that's not the surest thing to measure against.

But I know the warehouse. I know the dark of it, the smell of it, and the way the first one looked at me right before.

I know it the way you know a song you can't stop hearing, the one that plays under everything, that's been playing under everything since spring.

The jury couldn't know it. That's the difference.

They couldn't find the evidence that would've confirmed I murdered those men, because the gun is at the bottom of the kind of water that doesn't give things back.

Dag stood up in his good suit in this courtroom and said circumstantial about forty times in three days.

Enough that the twelve of them went away, came back, and decided the State couldn't prove what I know in my bones.

So. I’m not guilty.

I should feel something. I keep waiting to feel something.

I check for it the way you pat your pockets for keys, and the pocket's empty, and I'm standing in a courtroom that's gone loud and bright around me, and there's nothing in me but the hum.

The hum that doesn't stop.

The hum that's been climbing for months, high and fine and electric.

It makes the lights too sharp, my own skin too tight, and my thoughts too fast to walk alongside.

Dag's hand is on my shoulder. He's saying my name. "Njal. Njal. Look at me, son."

I look at him. His face won't hold still.

It's not moving—I know it's not actually moving—but it won't hold still for me, the edges of it sliding when I try to fix on them.

"It's done," he says. "You hear me? You're free. You walk out of here a free man."

Free.

There is no freedom for me, not really.

They process the paperwork for an hour while I sit on a bench in a hallway, and the hum gets louder.

My leg won't stop. My knee's going like a piston, and I can't make it quit, and Dag's wife sits down beside me.

Esperanza, sharp and small and the only person all week who's talked to me like I'm a man and not a verdict waiting to happen.

She puts her hand flat on my knee and stills it without a word. Just presses down until the engine of me goes quiet under her palm.

"You did good in there," she says. "You stayed quiet. That's all we needed from you."

I want to tell her I don't remember staying quiet. I don't remember most of the few days we were in there.

I remember pieces, bright hard pieces with nothing connecting them—the flag in the corner, the court reporter's red nails, a juror in the back who wouldn't look at me, the water in the pitcher I wasn't allowed to pour myself.

The days have holes in them. The last few months are mostly holes, and the holes are getting bigger, and the parts that aren't holes are too loud.

There's a name in one of the holes.

I don't go after it.

I've learned that much—not to go after it, because when I go after it, the whole thing lights up, and I can't get out for hours.

A name, a wedding, and a man named Doran with his hand on the small of her back, and the certainty, the certainty, that had me by the throat for months.

That she was mine. That something was being taken. That I was the only one who could see what was coming for her, and I had to?—

The hallway tips.

Esperanza's hand is back on my knee. "Breathe, mijo. You're all right. Breathe."

I breathe. The hallway rights itself, more or less. The name goes back in its hole.

I didn't kill three men over a woman.

I want that on a record somewhere, even if the only record is me, and I'm the least reliable record there is.

I killed three of Bembe's men because they were Bembe's, and Bembe had his sights set somewhere he had no business setting them, and somebody had to.

That part was clean.

That part is the one piece of the whole rotten spring that still makes a kind of sense to me when I lay it out in the dark—the club's safer with those three in the ground, and I'm the one who put them there, and I'd do it again sober as a judge.

It's the rest of it that doesn't make sense.

The reason I went. The fire that drove me. The woman I can't think about without the floor tipping. That's the part that's broken. Not the killing. The reason.

I just can't always tell, anymore, which part of me is which.

My mother's waiting at the end of the hall.

I see her before she sees me, and for one second she's just a woman standing in bad fluorescent light, small, gray coming in at her temples that wasn't there a year ago, and I put that there.

I know I put that there.

Then she turns and sees me, and her whole face breaks open. She crosses the floor and takes my face in both her hands the way she did when I was a boy.

Her hands are shaking, and she doesn't say thank the gods and she doesn't say it's over.

She says, "You're going. Tomorrow."

I try to step back. She doesn't let me.

She's got my face in her hands, and she's stronger than she looks.

She's always been stronger than she looks, and she holds me there and makes me hear it.

"There's a place. Your father and I found it. It's good, it's the best one, and they know what they're doing, and you're going tomorrow, and you're staying as long as it takes."

"Mom—"

"I sat in that courtroom for days, Njal.

" Her voice doesn't rise. That's the thing about my mother.

It goes quiet and flat and immovable, and quiet-and-flat is how you know there's no ground left to argue on.

"Days, listening to them talk about my son like he's a thing that happened.

And I watched you the whole time, Njal. I watched you not be in there with us.

You haven't been in there with us since the spring.

" Her eyes are wet, but they don't spill.

"They let you go today, and I will thank God for that every day I've got left. But the law letting you go is not the same as you being well, and I’m not getting you back from one thing just to lose you to the other. "

Behind her, my father appears.

He's not a man who fills a room with words.

He fills it some other way—with the size of him, the stillness, the sense that the floor belongs to him wherever he stands on it.

He steps up beside my mother and puts one hand on her shoulder, and he looks at me.

For a long moment he doesn't say anything at all.

"Your mother's right." His voice is gravel and gone rough at the bottom.

"And I'll tell you the rest of it, the part she's too kind to say.

I watched three of Bembe's men get talked about in that room like a weather report.

I felt nothing for them, you understand me?

Nothing. They had it coming, and you're mine, and I'd burn that whole courthouse down before I'd let them put you in a cell for it.

" His jaw works. "But I sat there and watched my son not know what day it was.

I watched you flinch at sounds that weren't there.

And that, boy—that I can't burn down. That I can't fix with money, with Dag, or with my own two hands.

There's only the one road, and you're taking it. "

He doesn't cry. He won't. But the shine's there in his eyes, the one he'll deny to his grave, and he gives me one nod—slow, heavy, final—and it lands on me harder than anything the judge said all day.

I'm a grown man, a prospect for the club, a man who walked into a warehouse and walked back out.

And my mother's telling me I'm going, and my father's backing her with a look, and the worst part, the part I can't get around, is that some small flat exhausted thing way down underneath the hum is so tired it could weep with relief.

Because nothing makes sense.

Because I can't trust the floor or my hands or the size of any word anybody says to me.

Because there's a name in a hole I can't stop almost-reaching for, and a certainty that drove me to do a thing the law forgave and I can't… and I am so tired of being trapped in a body that runs too hot and a head that won't stop climbing.

"Okay," I tell her.

It comes out cracked.

She hears the crack, pulls me down, and holds my head against her shoulder right there in the courthouse hall.

I let her, because for one second the hum drops low enough that I can.

Runes finds me outside.

He's leaning against the building in the cold with a cigarette he's not smoking, just holding, the way he does.

When I come down the steps, he pushes off the wall and meets me on the sidewalk and looks at me for a long time before he says anything.

"You hear your mother?" he asks.

"I heard her."

"Good. Then you'll hear me." He doesn't put his hand on me.

Runes isn't a toucher. He just stands square in front of me so I've got nowhere to look but at him.

"I'm glad you walked. I want you to know that first. The whole table's glad you walked.

You're ours, and we don't forget that, not for this, not ever. "

"But?"

"But." He turns the unlit cigarette in his fingers.

"You don't come back to the club the way you are right now.

I can't have it. I won't have it. Not because of what you did—what you did is between you and the gods, and it's handled—but because of what you are right now, which is a man who's not all the way in his own head.

I've watched it for months. We all have.

We've been holding our breath, waiting for you to either come back to us or fly clean apart.

Today you got a door other men in your shoes don't get. You're going to walk through it."

The hum wants me to argue.

The hum's got a hundred things to say, fast and bright and certain, about how I'm fine, how I've never seen clearer, how they're the ones who don't understand?—

I know that voice now. I've started, just barely, in the last few terrible weeks, to be able to hear that voice as a separate thing from me. That's the only reason I don't say any of it.

"Get your head right," Runes says quietly.

"Whatever it takes. However long it takes. You do that, and the club’s waiting on the other side of it.

You're not doing it for them. You're doing it so there's a you left to come home.

" He puts the cigarette in his pocket, unsmoked.

"That's the only road back, son. There's no other one. I'd tell you if there was."

I look at him, and his face holds still. His is the only one all day that's held still.

"Yeah," I say. "Okay."

* * *

They drive me up the next morning, my mother in the front, my father at the wheel, and nobody talks, and the hum fills the whole car.

The place is low and brick and set back off the road behind a lot of green, and from the outside it doesn't look like anything.

It looks like an insurance office. It looks like nothing.

That's almost worse—the thing I've been so afraid of, the locked door at the end of everything, looks like a building where you'd go to renew a policy.

We sit in a small room, and people in soft voices ask me my name and the date and who the president is.

I get the date wrong by two days, and I watch my mother's hands twist in her lap when I do.

Then it's time, and my parents can't come past a certain set of doors.

My mother holds onto me so hard it hurts, and my father grips the back of my neck the way he's done since I was small, heavy and steadying, and says the only thing he says all day.

"Come home to us. You hear me? Come home."

And then there's a hallway, and a woman with a lanyard walking beside me, and a door at the end of it, and we go through, and behind me?—

The lock turns.

It's not loud. That's the thing I'll remember.

A movie would make it loud, a great iron clang, but it's just a small electronic click and a green light going red, and that's it, that's the whole sound of the world closing behind me.

The hum, for one second, goes silent.

And into the silence comes the cleanest thought I've had in months, flat and plain and true as anything I've ever known: I'm trapped.

I'm caged. I traded one set of bars for another, and these ones I walked into on my own two feet.

I stand in the hallway and feel the walls of it press in, and the desire to turn around and put my fist through that red light and the door behind it rises up so hard my hand actually closes.

And then, under it—way under it, under the hum and the panic and the animalistic need to run—that small flat exhausted thing speaks up again.

The one piece of me that the spring didn't burn down. The one that's so tired of not making sense.

See it through, it says. They told you the truth. This is the only road back. See it through.

I open my hand.

I follow the woman with the lanyard down the hall.

And somewhere behind me, a man I used to be stays locked on the other side of that door, and I leave him there, because the only way I get to go home is to get better, to get treatment.

I’ve been manic for so long I don’t know how to be anything else.