Valkyrie's Vow (THE WILD HUNT MC #3)

Prologue

Solveig

I want to be clear about my role, because people get it wrong.

I am not a rescuer. I have never pulled a body out of anything. I have never held a wound closed, never breathed into a mouth, never said stay with me and meant it as a request.

I am an auditor.

I come to the place where a life is ending and I read it. I check the figure against the ledger. I decide which column it belongs in. Some go up. Most go nowhere at all, which is not a punishment. It's arithmetic.

That's the job. That's the whole job. My sisters and I have been doing it since before this country had a name to argue about, and in all that time not one of us has been asked to feel anything about it, which is fortunate, because we were not issued the equipment.

Below me, the eleven men had built a fire out of fence posts they had almost certainly stolen.

They were young. All of them. Younger than they believed they were.

They had come back from a war that chewed them and spat them onto a prairie with no idea what to do with them, and they had bought motorcycles with their separation pay because the alternative was sitting still, and sitting still was going to kill them faster than the road ever would.

One of them had a bottle. He passed it in a circle, and every man drank from the same place on the rim, which told me they had already decided they were a single thing.

"Say it again," one of them said. "Slower."

"I said what I said."

"Halvard. Slower."

The man they called Halvard put his hands out toward the fire. He had a face like a door that had been kicked in once and put back badly.

"There's a thing in the road," he said. "Been in the road since before the road. It goes hunting. It takes men who don't have anywhere else to be."

"That's us," said the one with the bottle, agreeably.

"That's us."

"So we let it take us."

"No." Halvard shook his head. "We ride with it. We don't get taken. We get called. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"There is if you're the one being called."

I remember thinking, with the flat professional interest of a woman reading a form she has read ten thousand times: they don't know what they're signing.

Nobody ever does. That isn't a flaw in the system. That is the system.

I had been sent to watch. Nothing else. My instructions were four words long and were delivered by something that did not have a face that day, which is not unusual, and which I have never found rude.

Attend. Observe. Don't participate.

So I attended. So I observed. So I stood on the ridge with the wind pulling my coat sideways and did not participate while eleven men who should have been asleep in eleven separate beds put their hands on a piece of paper that a stranger in a grey coat had unrolled across a motorcycle seat.

I could not read the paper from where I stood.

I want that on the record. I have been asked about it since — by my sister, by things above my sister — and my answer has never changed.

I was on the ridge. The paper was in the firelight.

I saw eleven men bend over it one at a time like men taking communion, and I saw the grey coat wait with his hands behind his back the way a man waits when he has already won and is being polite about it.

I did not see what it said.

I saw only that there was a line at the bottom that nobody used.

That detail sat in me for eighty years the way a splinter sits in a palm. Not painful. Just present. Just there every time I closed my hand.

When it was done, they whooped. They actually whooped, like boys, like it was a bet won instead of a bet placed. Somebody kicked the fire and the sparks went up in a spiral and hung there longer than sparks are permitted to.

And Halvard Kane, who had signed first, stepped back out of the light, tipped his head up, and looked directly at me.

Nobody looks at me.

That isn't modesty. It's a property of what I am, the way water is wet. You do not see the auditor. You see weather. You see a woman on a road at a distance. You see nothing at all and you go back to what you were doing.

He looked at me.

Then he raised his hand and waved.

The wind came up the slope carrying woodsmoke and gasoline and the yeasty smell of eleven men who had not bathed since Bismarck.

I did not wave back.

There is a rule. It isn't written anywhere. It is the entire architecture of me.

Never wave back.

The moment you wave back, you're in it. The moment you're in it, you are not reading the ledger, you are arguing with it, and the ledger does not argue.

The ledger simply is. It is the least sentimental object in creation, it has never once been wrong, and every chooser who has tried to put a thumb on it has ended up written into it.

So I stood there with my hands at my sides like a good instrument, and I watched him lower his arm, disappointed and unsurprised, and turn back to his fire.

My sister Halla was on the ridge with me that night. I've left her out until now because she'd prefer it, and because she has a way of taking over a paragraph.

"He waved," she said.

"I saw."

"Sol. He waved."

"I'm aware of what waving is."

"You've gone a color." She looked at me sideways. She has looked at me sideways since the Migration Period and I have never once caught her doing it first. "There's a color you go. You went it in Novgorod and you went it at that business with the ferry."

"There is no color. I'm a function."

"Everything's a function until it isn't." Halla stretched. Below us, somebody put a boot through the fire and the sparks went up. "Do you want to know what I think that piece of paper is?"

"No."

"I think it's a receipt for something that hasn't been bought yet," she said, "and I think in eighty years somebody's going to find it in a drawer and read it out loud in a room, and I think everyone in that room will believe it says the opposite of what it says.

That's how they write. They don't lie. They rule the columns. "

"You're being poetic."

"I'm being administrative," Halla said, offended. "It's the most administrative thing I've said all century."

He died nine years ago in a ditch four miles from that ridge. Of course I was there. He was still giving orders when I read him, which I respected, and his last words were not for me, which I respected more.

I filed him. I moved on. I did not think about the wave again.

Now.

Seventy-eight years later, the fence posts are gone and the road has been resurfaced eleven times and there is a stretch of Highway 200 east of Havregard where the accidents cluster in a way the state has spent forty years failing to explain.

They studied the camber. They studied the sightlines. They put up a sign, then a better sign, then a sign about the signs.

The accidents did not care about the signs.

I care about that stretch of road because it is a customer.

It is, if you want to be crude, my most reliable account.

I have stood in that ditch a hundred times with the ledger open in my head and read a hundred people out of their lives, and I have felt about it precisely what a bank feels about a Tuesday.

I have a rule about waves and I have a rule about names, and the second one is this: I never learn them early.

You get the name at the end. That's how the office works and it's a mercy, though not for the reason people assume. It isn't to spare me. It's because a name learned early becomes a person, and a person is not a figure, and a figure is the only thing I'm equipped to read.

I had Ivar Boone's name for six weeks before that ditch.

Six weeks is nothing. Six weeks is a blink; I have stood in fields for longer without thinking. But it was six weeks of walking around with a name in me that had not yet been earned, and I want to note, for whoever eventually reads this, that the rot starts there.

Not with the wave. With the advance notice.

Somebody gave me six weeks on purpose.

At 11:42 on a Thursday night in June, a truck came off it doing ninety.

I was already in the ditch. I'm always already in the ditch. That's not foreknowledge, exactly. It's more like being a tide.

The truck went over twice and landed on its roof in the beans, and the engine kept running for four full seconds after it stopped, which is a sound I've grown fond of the way you grow fond of anything you hear enough.

Then it caught.

I opened the ledger.

The name was there. It had been there for six weeks, sitting in the column like a chair pulled out for somebody.

IVAR BOONE.

And the date. Eight weeks out. Late August. A round number. The gods love a round number the way a landlord loves the first of the month.

I looked at the burning truck and thought, well, that's early, with mild administrative annoyance, because a man dying on the wrong date makes paperwork for someone, and that someone has historically been me.

The driver's door came off.

It didn't open. It came off, hinges and all, and went into the beans, and a man crawled out through the space where it had been, on fire in two places, and stood up in the ditch and beat the flames out of his own sleeve with a hand that was also on fire.

Then he checked the truck.

Not himself. The truck. He leaned back toward that burning cab like a man who's misplaced his phone.

"Renny," he said. Conversationally. "Renny. You in there?"

Nobody was in there. He had been alone.

He said it twice more anyway, quieter each time, and then he sat down in the dirt at the edge of the beans with his forearms on his knees and watched his own truck burn with an expression I can only describe as inconvenienced.

I have been present at eleven of his wrecks.

I say that plainly because it took me until the fourth to notice, until the seventh to admit it, until the ninth to check the ledger and find that his name had never once been on it — not those nights, not those dates, not ever — and until the tenth to understand what that meant.

Eleven wrecks. Eleven walk-aways.

A man does not walk away from eleven wrecks.

A man walks away from eleven wrecks if something is holding him back. You don't survive that much. You get reserved.

The fire found the fuel line and the noise went up an octave and the whole ditch went orange, and Ivar Boone — whom the club calls Crash, for reasons requiring no footnote — sat in the dirt and put his burnt palm flat on the cool ground the way you'd rest a hand on a dog.

I stood ten feet from him in the grass. Invisible. Unremarkable. Weather.

He turned his head.

"You always show up before the ambulance," he said.

I didn't answer. I'm not required to answer. I'm not required to be audible, and there is a version of this night where I simply stop being present and he decides he hit his head, and that version is by every available measure the correct one.

"Six years, give or take," he said. "You were at the Hanson bridge one. You were at the one with the deer. You were at the one that wasn't my fault, which I'd like noted somewhere."

The fire popped. He didn't flinch. He had not flinched once, and I have watched men flinch at their own heartbeats.

"They don't fly a helicopter for a single-vehicle rollover in a bean field," he said. "Not this fast. Not eleven times."

"You've been counting," I said.

My voice sounded strange in my own mouth. Out loud is a thing I do perhaps twice a decade, and never to them.

"I count everything. It's my whole personality. Ask anybody, they'll complain about it." He turned his hand over and studied the burn across the palm like it was a receipt. "Doc says it's a miracle. Deke says it's a spreadsheet. Deke has a spreadsheet."

"Of your accidents."

"Color-coded." He considered. "Green's walked away. There's no other color on it yet, so honestly the coding's aspirational."

"You want to know the worst part?" he said. "Insurance. Eleven claims. There's a woman in Fargo named Carol who has, at this point, a relationship with me."

"Carol."

"Carol thinks I'm running a scam and can't prove it and it's eating her alive. She sent an investigator once. He followed me for two weeks and then quit his job and moved to Montana."

"Because of you?"

"Because of North Dakota," Crash said. "I want to be fair to the man."

I did not laugh. I want that on the record too, because it is the last honest report I can make about myself: on the night everything began, I did not laugh, and I stood there in a ditch calculating exactly how far to the second I could stay before this stopped being observation.

The sirens started somewhere west, minutes out, the sound bending across the flat the way sound does here — arriving from everywhere and nowhere.

I should have gone. The correct action, the one I had taken ten times in this precise circumstance, was to stop being present and let the paramedics do their small brave useless work.

I looked at his name in the ledger. Eight weeks.

I looked at him sitting in the dirt, asking a burning truck whether a nineteen-year-old boy was inside it.

"You want to sit down?" he said. "You've got the face of somebody about to tell me something I won't like."

"I'm not permitted to tell you anything."

"Sure." He nodded slowly, as if that were a sentence people say. "Permitted. Okay. That's a hell of a word choice, and I'm going to think about it at three in the morning, and I'm going to be extremely annoyed."

"Yes," I said. "You are."

The sirens got louder. The fire got smaller. The night did the enormous indifferent thing prairie nights do, which is continue.

And Ivar Boone pushed himself out of the dirt, one burnt hand and one whole one, got his boots under him, and looked at me across ten feet of ditch grass exactly the way Halvard Kane had looked up a ridge at me seventy-eight years before.

Like I was a person standing in a field.

Which I have never been. Not once. Not for anyone.

Then he raised his hand.

Not a salute. Not a signal. Nothing operational. Just a man in a field waving at a woman in the dark, because he'd seen her and it seemed like the thing you do.

I have run the numbers on that moment more times than I have run the numbers on anything. I can tell you with absolute precision what it cost. I can tell you with equal precision that I knew the figure at the time.

I waved back.