The Awakening_Book 1 of Valkyrie's Curse series Read online

  “Who are you?” He held the dagger in front of him, ready to use it again. His jaw was clenched, his breaths coming hard and deep.

  “I’m Tyr. I would think that was obvious since you’ve brought me sacrifices.” The man stepped closer.

  He dropped to his knee, bowing before Tyr. “My apologies. I didn’t know she was not a natural blonde.”

  “Tsk tsk tsk, I don’t care about that. Traditionally, in this part of earth, most of the women are either a redhead or a blonde.”

  Tyr stepped close to the body, running his hand over her limp arm. “As long as they aren’t redheads.”

  He stepped back, wiping his hand on a clean part of her shirt.

  “A bit of a personal quirk.” He smirked. “You’ve done well. All that remains is to acquire the key. Those bumbling fools you hired to get it failed you, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t recall directing anyone in the scrolls to involve others in this task.”

  “No sir. I thought” He clasped his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels.

  “You thought wrong!” Tyr waved his hand in the other man’s direction.

  He began to choke. His hands flew up to his neck, trying to remove the invisible hand that squeezed his larynx.

  “Take her body to the stones up the hill. At the bottom of the second stone, you will find the location of the key. Don’t disappoint me again.”

  He released the man’s throat and disappeared.

  It took a few seconds of deep breathing before he moved from the spot. Then he hurriedly shoved her body in the bag, cleaned up the area, and drug everything else to the raft. He hoisted her dead body over his shoulder and began the long walk up the hill towards the stones.

  ~~~~~

  He should have known that the location was on the stones. Mentally kicking himself for not taking the time to read through the runes for himself, he trudged up the incline, stopping a few times to adjust the weight of his volunteer.

  He positioned her body as if she were leaning up against the stones resting. He stood, hands on his hips, trying to catch his breath for a minute before bending to read the runes.

  He heard noises in the camp and decided it wouldn’t be good to have company. He took out his cell phone and took several pictures of both stones, making sure he could read all of the inscriptions, then took off at a jog back down the hill, with the empty bag tossed over his shoulder.

  With a stern expression, his brows furrowed he started the Evinrude motor and headed towards his yacht. He’d been visited by Tyr which meant he was on the right track. Now he had some work to do to decipher the rune stones.

  Chapter 20: Valkyrie Blood

  The Valkyries Prayer

  Hail Day! Hail the Sons of Day!

  Hail Night and the Daughters of Night!

  Gaze on us with gracious eyes,

  Award us victory, we who wait.

  Hail the Gods! Hail the Goddesses!

  Hail Earth who gives to all!

  Wisdom and fair speech gives to us

  And healing hands while we live.

  A translation of Sigrdrifumal: “sayings of the victory-bringer”

  Scott heard the sirens in the distance. They grew louder as they got closer to their camp. ”What the heck?” He ducked out and ran to Lena’s tent. ”Lena. Lena.” Surely she hadn’t fallen asleep already. He tried louder ”Lena!”

  There was no answer. He ducked his head inside and looked around. He jogged over to the work tent and ducked inside. She wasn’t there either but all of her stuff was strewn over the tables. The police car stopped in front of the Ops tent.

  A tall thin man stepped out of the car. ”We have a call for assistance from our patrol?”

  At that moment Scott realized that the ATV was missing.

  ”She’s probably at the site.”

  He motioned to the officer, and ran around the car to get into the passenger’s side. He pointed down the trail towards the site. The officer sped down the gravel and mud trail.

  They found the ATV, but not Lena.

  Scott ducked into the tunnel. He found the skid marks from her shoes in the muck and the recently fallen sod from the ceiling. The officer searched the grounds and searched the tunnel. Soon the area was swarming with several police officers and the area taped off as a crime scene.

  It was determined that the skid marks were a sign of struggle. When they found blood in the tunnel, things looked pretty grim.

  Scott was a bundle of nerves.

  How could this happen? He had just been with her not an hour before. He had lain on his cot warring with his emotions whether to go back to her tent or give her time. He wasn’t really angry with her anymore and he hated the fact that the last thing he had said to her was criticizing her for not giving credit.

  He took off at a run towards the camp, furious with himself. Fueled by anger and the fear that somehow Lena would be the next victim and the thought of that terrified him.

  Scott reached the camp in a short amount of time winded from the exertion. He stood with his hands on his thighs, bent over trying to catch his breath. When he walked into camp, there was chaos there as well.

  One of the new undergrads was missing. She had arrived at camp the day before, but was nowhere to be found. The other girl in her tent told them that she left the party and she hadn’t been seen since.

  Scott phoned the officer that had first showed up and reported the girl missing.

  This was not going anything like he had hoped. What the hell was going on around here? He searched for Brad, the only voice of sanity in the whole camp at the moment. He found him in the mess hall with his laptop, chatting online with his girl.

  ”Figured I’d find you in here.” He grabbed an apple from the large fruit bowl.

  ”Hey.” Brad nodded as he tapped away on the keys. ”So where’s Lena?”

  Scott sat in the chair, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. ”She’s gone man. Someone kidnapped her. There was blood in the tunnel.”

  Brad looked up from his keyboard. ”Seriously?”

  ”Yeah man” Scott clenched his jaw. ”She’s gone.”

  ”Oh damn. That kind of blows holes in the project, and what with the new chick disappearing” he tapped out a few more words then set his computer on the table. He sat silent for a few seconds before he started.

  ”Look, we’ll do everything we can to find them, but we have to let the police do their work. Let’s go over to the Ops tent and see what Lena was working on last night.

  I thought you guys were getting close. You’ve always had a thing for her haven’t you?”

  Scott nodded his head.

  Brad closed out his screen. ”Juliet my love, something has come up.” He stated out loud as he tapped in the message. ”We’ll continue our rp later, darling.” He turned to Scott saying “Alright, let’s go.”

  The two walked in silence to the main work center to check Lena’s computer. “It’s only a matter of time, if the police are any good before they want to confiscate our equipment.” Brad worked as he talked.

  He quickly bypassed Lena’s passwords and pulled up the telemetry screens, then the video feed that Lena had watched.

  ”There!” Scott pointed to the screen. They both zeroed in on the big man in the tunnel.

  Brad inserted cables to Lena’s computer and then into his own. He downloaded the recorded feed onto his computer.

  ”Yeah they are going to want to see this.” The men watched a little longer and saw Lena show up on the screen. She slipped, tried to catch herself then stumbled headlong. She was there falling and then, she wasn’t.

  ”Hmmm. Well, they are going to want these for evidence, but I don’t think. . .” he trailed off for a moment. He checked the progress of the transfer, when it was done, he deleted the part with Lena.

  ”Yeah, they are going to want this. But we gotta get out of here and make sure they don’t take mine.”

  The
two men walked from the Ops tent towards their tent. Brad continued as they walked.

  “I haven’t told you what I’ve deciphered from the door. Or wall. It makes sense now, but you’re never going to believe it. Good news is . . . your girlfriend isn’t dead, yet.”

  Scott looked at him hopeful.

  ”The bad news is, if we don’t figure this out fast she’ll be dead by the next full moon. That’s ten days away.”

  Brad stashed his computer in the bottom of his footlocker and took out a second laptop computer and shrugged. ”Backup. You never know.”

  He removed several files from it, then tucked it under his arm. ”Let’s go. We’ll share the files with the police, set them on the trail then get back on this ourselves. Then, I’ll show you what I’ve found.”

  Chapter 21: Megalithic Rune Stones

  A Nord is judged not by the manner in which he lived, but the manner in which he died.

  Norse Proverb

  Chaos.

  The entire camp was nothing but chaos.

  The undergrads were panicked, Scott, Brad, and Joe scrambled to keep order. It was a lost cause. After a while, they just directed traffic.

  Nialls Whitfield strolled out of his tent around nine, two hours after the police had cleared out.

  ”Is this how you run a camp? Why aren’t they at the dig site?” He tossed out as he strode towards them.

  Brad nodded in his direction. ”Not normally. Can’t start yet.” He crossed his arms bracing for the argument.

  Niall’s dodged a frantic female gibbering something about not signing up for murder by moonlight. He stared after her before moving the two final steps to reach the men.

  ”What the hell? What do you mean you can’t start yet? You should have already started on excavation with C and D teams.”

  He looked around, taking in the noisy students running around.

  ”Where’s Helena? Isn’t she supposed to be in charge of this camp?”

  Brad jumped in, cutting Scott off as he moved towards Nialls with his jaw clenched. He’d worked with him before and knew his routine.

  ”Well Nialls, we’ve had quite a bit of excitement here this morning before you decided to get your sorry self out of bed. Typically, our days start around seven, breakfast is served at that time. Our schedules, if you would bother to read them, dictate that personnel be on site by eight a.m.”

  “However, the plan had to be deviated from, as Ms. Helena Eskildson is in fact missing, possibly kidnapped as well as one of the new arrivals, Amanda Keifer.” Brad crossed his arms over his chest.

  “The police have blocked off the site from our access until they finish scouring the area to find any evidence.”

  Nialls watched the people dart by, his hands on his waist, elbows out to the sides, wondering what, if anything could be done to salvage this operation.

  “If you’d like to rush back and inform Dr. Montgomery of that development, feel free. Perhaps he can get some coordination with the police force down here for a more organized investigation. In the meantime, we wait.”

  Nialls huffed indignantly. ”I am not here merely to convey information to Dr. Montgomery. He is in fact heading the funding of this and therefore requires certain reports from me. You’re just jealous you didn’t get the job Brad, as usual. He was smoothing the front of his button down shirt when the rest of what Brad had told him hit him.

  ”Wait, what? Helena has been kidnapped? Why? Who would want to kidnap her?”

  Scott made a move towards Nialls, but Brad held him back and gave him a slanted brow.

  ”Really, Nialls, I don’t know how you are going to make effective reports when you don’t have a clue about what is going on. Insulting the boss and us isn’t going to get you any cooperation.” He motioned to Scott to leave.

  ”Wait. Who’s the other girl? Where are the police? Are you cooperating with them?”

  ”Guess you better run and make your report.” Scott tossed the words at him in a mocking tone, then tisked him a few times before adding ”Always the last to know.”

  Scott stormed off towards the mess tent.

  ~~~~~

  Lena walked down the tunnel, with the man behind her. It was easy to get disoriented down here. She tried to think about how the telemetry plan looked on the monitor.

  She stopped, motioned to the man then knelt down grabbing a stone, and began scratching what she remembered of the tunnels from Scott’s equipment.

  The research from other sites that were similar, often had a distinct east west lay out. North and south were often burial chambers, or corridors leading to various storage rooms, and some connected to other sites as well.

  She worked slowly trying to recall the image she had seen on the screen. She closed her eyes trying to concentrate.

  “Hvilken slags trolddom er det?” The man squatted down near her. (What sort of sorcery is this?)

  Helena was trying hard to concentrate. She understood part of what he said – What type of trickery is this.

  “No tricks, a map. Er, ingen tricks, et kort.”

  She had a great mind for details. She could remember things almost instantly. As she drew out the map, the man took her hand and shook his head.

  “Nej, det er forkert. ligesom dette.” (No, you’re wrong.)

  He picked up another stone and touched her map with his fingers, then moved over to a spot next to her. He brushed away the dust on the floor, then handed her the torch to hold. He drew the front of the tunnels in the same fashion that she had, then drew concentric circles resembling the triskel with additional lines. It was an elaborate design.

  Helena glanced between the two, then tapped both at the point where she had come through the wall.

  ”Ja” He nodded eagerly.

  She tapped the wall behind them, then made a questioning expression and tapped the map. He marked an x on his map. It was just before a chamber on the left. He nodded, then touched where the chamber was on the map then motioned silently that it was just around the curve of the tunnel.

  He tugged her to her feet then pulled her along to the chamber. This had apparently been where he rested. Helena’s mind raced with wild thoughts, questioning his intentions before he shone the light on the wall of the chamber. On it, he had drawn an elaborate map. He had drawn out next to it a calendar of sorts. She moved closer to the map.

  “Crap! You’ve contaminated the site.”

  As she looked closer she realized that he’d been here for a while. There was a store of mead, some sort of stale bread, and a spot where he’d had a fire.

  He offered her his journal he’d been keeping. It was scrawled in some runic language she didn’t understand. She flipped through page after page, but shook her head that she couldn’t read a word of it.

  That would be Brad’s forte. She surveyed the map closely, noticing he’d made notes of several locations. It seemed to be an ornate labyrinth, without an exit.

  “Vi skal finde exit.”

  He nodded his head slowly but less enthusiastically. He clasped her hand tenderly and began to wash her wound, then bound it in a strip of cloth. She gave him an earnest smile.

  ~~~~~

  Brad and Scott sat in his tent, heads together poring over Brad’s translation notes.

  “Now, you see here how Lena slid down, cut her hand, then appears to fall through the stone. Based on my translations, the stone guards the entrance to the in between place.”

  Scott stared blankly at Brad.

  “The Vikings believed the warriors would go to either Valhalla or Nefflheim. This in between place is where they await their sentence until they are escorted to either by a Valkyrie.”

  He points to the section on the screen showing Scott. The writing says ‘When blood is shed upon the door, by the moonlight shall the Valkyrie enter. To guide the lost to their destinations until Ragnarok. They must emerge by the light of the next full moon, lest they both be lost forever.”

  Brad turned to Scott with a serious exp
ression, hesitating before continuing. “Another Valkyrie must open the door for the Valkyrie to return to the world of man.”

  Scott looked at his friend as if he’d lost his mind. ”So you’re saying that Lena fell through this,” he paused, his hand on his chin feeling the scruff of beard “this door, which is a stone wall that extends for forty feet in either direction, into another dimension because she’s a Valkyrie?”

  ”I know it sounds weird man, but look at the tape. She fell through the freakin’ door!” Brad defended his interpretation, adamantly. “On one hand, it looks like Lena was right, this spot was of great significance in the Viking world. Which means, they would have fortified walls and a huge arsenal of weapons. We just have to find them.”

  Scott said nothing, but stared at the screen for a few seconds.

  “On the other hand, Lena’s not here to continue the project and we have bitten off more than we can chew.”

  Scott just stared at the screen, not hearing anything Brad said. ”So in order to save her, we only have to find another ’Valkyrie. Sure, let’s just line up the undergrads and have them touch the stone.”

  ”No, it’s not that simple.”

  ”Of course not. It never is, is it?”

  Scott stood turning his folding chair over. “Great! What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Well, there’s more.” Brad scrolled his screen down to the end of the document.

  Scott stopped, threw his head up to the ceiling, his hands on his hips. ”Of course there’s more. What?”

  ”It requires her blood as well.”

  ”So, what? We have to find some sort of test to determine if one of these girls is a Valkyrie or do we go to jail for slashing girls hands open?”

  ”I’m working on it. We’ll figure something out.”

  Brad worked diligently as Scott stormed around the room. After several minutes he decided this was getting him nowhere.

  “I’m heading over to see what the police have found and what sort of damage they’ve done to the site.”

  He jumped on the four wheeler and took off gunning the throttle, not noticing that Nialls was running behind him trying to catch up.