Drinking with Vikings

Somebody bumped me, jolting me back to the present.

“Hey, you asleep?” Small Paul asked.

He pushed the drinking horn into my hands, sloshing a bit. I took it, tipped it back, and let out a hum of pleasure. Mead was the best booze ever. I could drink it all night, and had been doing so since sundown.

Coral will be fine. She’s getting more dangerous, but who am I to judge? I’m half monster myself.

Wish she was here tonight. Shame our technomancer wigged out over too much nature and decided to go find a motel, and she went with…

Oh well, more mead for me!

A little giggle escaped me as I passed the horn on and licked my wrist clean.

“Kid, you sure you’re twenty-one?” the brewmaster asked, taking the horn to refill it with another bottle’s worth of his delicious concoctions. He had a dark goatee gone half to silver, wore matching embroidered robes, and looked like a Renaissance wizard. Someone had said he was an alchemist, but as far as I could tell, the only gold he made was the stuff getting me wasted.

No complaints! Mmm meeeead.

“Already showed you my ID!” I said brightly. “Wanna see it again?”

Our technomancer friend had made flawless fakes for himself, Coral, and me before the trip, right down to false profiles in the surviving local systems. Most radio and wireless signals were still blocked by the Elsecomers, and they’d somehow corrupted most high-speed data lines. But local phone and dial-up? Dial-up was so obsolete by the time the aliens invaded, they’d completely disregarded it.

Earth might be down, but she’s not out, I thought, a bit proud. We’re even starting to recover.

Anyway, Coral and I didn’t exactly scream “legal adult.” Ragnar, who was a sheriff’s deputy back in real life, had actually called in to have someone log in and check our IDs. Fair enough; of our four friends camping, only one was actually legal to drink. The rest of us were still in high school, with an entire year left to go. We had another six weeks’ summer break to get drunk, hunt monsters, and urbex dangerous ruins for loot before our senior year. The world was excellent, and it was ours.

I just have to ignore the feeling of being watched that hasn’t left since the fight. It‘s probably nothing, right?

“Johann, remind me what you found on draugr,” Ragnar said to the brewer, still staring into the night. “Do they rise every night, or only when it suits them? And Paul, any sign of another mound he could’ve crawled out of?”

“Definitely this one,” the brewer said. “But lore’s… scarce. Locals claim he comes out most nights. They’ve been staking livestock outside their houses, so he takes animals instead of them. Sounds like he kills about twice a week.”

Arrrrgh, I thought, I wish I could tell them, and let everyone relax!

But they’d probably burn me at the stake, Maybe stone me while dancing around the bonfire. It’d be quaint. Historically accurate. A nice team building activity.

“The closest farmer said he heard some kind of banshee wailing and saw weird bright lights last night, right on the mound,” Small Paul said. “Said he wouldn’t have gone out for love or money. Maybe something happened?”

I happened!

Dead dude’s defanged, now that Coral slurped all that nasty magic out of him. She didn’t kill… uh… unalive him, though, and we had to promise him proper Viking funeral rites before he’d go back in his tomb. Wants someone to “seeth” for him – what’s that even mean? No clue how we’re gonna pull it off. There’s a Way sparkling in my mind, though, an instinct that says Follow This Path until a possibility opens. So. Something will work out.

Arg. I’m a little worried about Coral.

That draugr was disgusting, like way worse than the other things she’s wanted to eat. I mean, she confined herself to just the animating magic – she didn’t, like, chow down on his rancid flesh or anything… but still. It was nasty as fuck. And afterward? I had to re-open that scratch and a vein for her to drink. She took at least double her normal draw to balance out again, too. Licked both shut, as usual, but… something has changed.

And the sense that something is still watching won’t go away.

I yawned, trying to blink it away.

“Kid, hit the sack,” Ragnar said, glancing over. “You want to do weapons tryouts tomorrow, you need sleep. We’re gonna run the newbies ragged.”

I nodded, too tired to argue, and snagged a random beer bottle from the cooler near Master Johann. The camp was still lively as I wove through it, but I was running on fumes.

No sleep for the us monster slayers. Hunt all night, drink all day, it’s a life!

My friend Bob had passed out by the main bonfire. It had a decent-sized crowd around it, though the folksinger looked about ready to pack it up. There wasn’t a spare inch on the seating logs, so I just leaned against Bob instead. At twenty-one, he was already a truck mechanic and built like a brick wall. He made a good pillow. I didn’t feel like being alone, or trying to sleep in the glorified blankie fort Bob called his historic tent.

Bob had started Changing when he was a senior and I was a freshman. Ate the wrong mushrooms, and they opened a torrent of Radiance that flowed into him like a pipe had burst. The interdimensional Elsecomer energy that had broken reality doesn’t react well with humans; sometimes they die, sometimes disappear, but more often Change. Radiance runs in the veins of mom’s people, and I could direct it a bit; I’d been able to nudge his just enough to keep him looking human. We shaped the Change for smithing magic aptitudes, not letting it turn him into the big World of Warcraft orc-thing he still saw in his dreams.

Anyway, he could pass. He could even handle raw iron, unlike the other three of us. He’d joined the SCA to learn traditional blacksmithing, and when he heard about the draugr hunt, he asked if we’d take care of it. Wanted to keep his human friends safe.

I leaned against him, and his snore rumbled through me. It reminded me of an old car my dad drove when I was little. Tipping my head back, I watched campfire sparks swirl up and dance with the Milky Way.

Mom was born Out There, after the sidhe went star-faring when Earth got too dull for them. Things went sideways, and she ended up stuck behind enemy lines on Earth. Met my dad, laid low. I happened.

She came from the stars. I came from a small town in the middle of peat bog nowhere, northern Minnesota. Her life was full of adventures, wild ones, running across a galaxy I can barely imagine. Me? If I’m lucky, I might cross into North Dakota this weekend. That’ll make three whole former U.S. states under my belt!

NoDak’s like half redcap territory. Dunno if tourism in an area infested with cannibal troll slavers is a good idea.

It must have been so easy to travel, back Before…

I curled in against Bob, my eyes drifting shut.

Nah, I decided. I’m not gonna be bitter. We defeated a serious monster, joined an awesome group, and discovered mead. Could things be more perfect?

Maybe if my bestie didn’t want to chew on stinky undead…

Meh. We’ve all got our quirks.

“Hey!” yelled a guy from across the fire, blinking eyes wide with blown-out pupils at me. “Elf ears aren’t allowed at reenactments!”

Are my glamours slipping? I thought, pulse suddenly hammering. I completely froze. Oh gods. Oh fuck. The humans are going to see us. They’re going to know.

They’re going to kill us all!