Wrath and Bones (5 page)

He finished our tour with, “All I can say is, this has got to be a sign of something serious, and I’m guessing I’m gonna need to know what that is, the sooner the better. Think you can help me out with that?”

I glanced up at Wesley, who had forgotten to keep his fedora tilted to hide his scars, engrossed by the sight of so much ruin in one place. Wesley nodded vaguely without taking his eyes off the wreckage, and I thought he was reporting on the sincerity I’d felt from the chief more than the situation at hand. 

I gave Fitchett a brief explanation of my two psychic Talents and how they worked, here, and their limitations. “I’ll be honest with you, without touching hot coals and shit, the site tells me little more than they bugged out, which you already knew. I can confirm something else you suspected: there’s some heavy duty panic embedded in the remains of their belongings. They didn’t just pack up and leave… they fled. The mood here is ugly. This was a mass of hearts-in-throat, heels-on-fire bolting exodus. This wasn’t something this particular den had ever done and they hadn’t practiced; there was a lot of upset in having to leave precious things behind. I’ll need to see the orc who stayed. Did he remain of his own volition, or was he placed in custody?”

“He stayed. He insisted. We didn’t understand most of what he said because it was some kind of garbled blend of Orc and English, but he got his point across. He said a few things we didn’t understand but he repeated your title. I got it; he
had
to speak with you.”

Because I’m the Litenvecht Späckkenhuggar. The rootin-est tootin-est Litenvecht Späckkenhuggar there ever was
. “We shouldn’t keep him waiting any longer, then. It’s getting late. Thanks for showing us around, Chief.”

He pumped my hand, harder this time, but still mindful of my smaller bone structure. “Text me before you go, would you? If you get any answers? I’ll be up all night. Keep me in the loop.” He began to stride back to his command spot, pointing a thick finger at his phone in a battered leather belt pouch.

I nodded before he disappeared into the swirling snow and ash. Wes cast one last look at the emergency personnel and various government officials who were still picking over the area, the latter group probably looking for a political angle. Wes’s jaw did a twitch that reminded me of Batten, but when I touched his arm, he just shook his head; the Blue Sense told me he was feeling suddenly sad and protective, and I realized that this was the first time Wesley had the opportunity to experience the general public’s dislike of me. He didn’t like it. I didn’t like it much, either, but it no longer bothered me as much as it once had. I unwrapped a butterscotch candy and returned to the taxi, knowing my brother would follow once he was done wrestling with this particular touch of chilly reality.

SINCE SOLDANO DIDN’T REALLY
want to see me, it was easy to avoid him on the way into the precinct. It was a little after midnight when a female officer showed me and Wes down a hall that smelled of old coffee grounds and human beings at the ends of their ropes. I’m not sure what I’d expected upon entering Schenectady PD’s last interrogation room at the end of the hall, but this wasn’t it.

The orc had a broad, low, rounded brow with wispy eyebrows that looked more like antennae; a slightly darker color than the driftwood-grey of his skin, they twitched when the flesh of his brow moved, and it often did. His eyes were the color of Dijon mustard, pupils and irises both, generously flecked with streaks of pale brown. His cheeks were splotched and creased; orc skin didn't tan evenly, and their pigmentation, similar to human melanin, was highly reactive to the sun. The orcs who ventured out of their Swedish homeland and voyaged south tended to darken rapidly in the summer, some of them to pitch black.

“Uh, howdy?” I began uncertainly. “Guten morgen? Bienvenidos? God kväll?”

“He understands spoken English well enough,” Wesley explained, picking up the orc’s train of thoughts effortlessly. “Your Swedish is terrible, by the way.” He tucked his chair closer to the table in a scooting motion. “He’s never taken the time to learn to speak English well, so he's not going to cast aspersions.”

Like ogres, orcs had thick tongues that worked around their own language well enough, but couldn’t pull of some of the subtler sounds of a human mouth. I didn’t think remarking on his giant tongue was the best way to make a first impression. “Whereas you, the undead dickbag who failed high school French three times, are going to go right ahead and do it for him. Douche. Or, for your monolinguistic ass,
vous c'est un douchenozzle
.”

Though he sat patiently enough, the orc was fidgety and unstill, and something – bad nerves, bad luck, or my bad French – had given him facial tics that looked like tectonic plates shifting. He had on a faded XXXXL T-shirt with Bob Marley’s face silk-screened on the front. In lieu of Marley's knit rasta-cap, the orc wore a porkpie hat. I wondered where they made hats to fit a head the size of a pumpkin.

 His wide, hunched back was capped with shoulders that reminded me of a certain boggle I’d once played touch football with, kinda-sorta. Despite the size of his upper body, his lower half was stunted, with bow legs and oddly tiny feet strapped into a pair of bright red Chuck Taylors. It was like some mischievous god had stuck the nozzle of an air pump in his belly button and inflated him from the waist up.  I wondered if Sheriff Hood would chide the orc about skipping leg day, but figured he was smart enough not to. He saved his annoying smack talk for when he had me in a choke hold during our sparring sessions, so I couldn't get enough air to swear at him the way he deserved. It was very motivating.

I sat, dropping my go-bag on the table. The orc’s nostrils flared. I could have fit a fist up one of them, but I was determined to keep this visit mucous-free. I wondered if my Shalimar perfume and the smoke that was clinging to my clothes blended to make a weird mélange in those big olfactory caves of his.  He could probably smell Harry’s scent on my clothes and my hair, too, and Wes was right next to me, adding his mundane and otherworldly notes to the mix.  I smiled, showing him my lack of fangs in case he thought I might be undead, and then remembered that smiling was akin to baring teeth as a sign of aggression to other creatures.
Wrong signal, Marnie. Duh.
My smile faded and I tried instead staring at his chin, dipping my gaze in a submissive display. His shoulders softened and fell slightly. I could almost see the tension draining from him.
Better
.

“Usually,” Wes continued, “he avoids human beings. Most humans are not comfortable in his presence, and he doesn’t like feeling unwanted.”

Orcs were not known for their temper; they had been living among humans for thousands of years, mostly unseen, and orc-on-human violence was rare. Human-on-orc violence, unfortunately, was well documented and probably the source of his disquiet. He
looked
like a monster. The textbooks assured me that his kind were docile unless cornered and provoked, but I could tell just by looking at him that my ancestors would have taken one look at his yellow eyes and jutting canines and called for a monster hunt. I felt a twinge of guilt and reminded myself that orcs were very sensitive to the feelings of others; today was not the day to indulge in monster-induced paranoia. Just because he
could
rip my arm off and beat me to death with it...

Wesley made an impatient noise and said softly, “So could I. Doesn’t mean I would.”

I smiled an apology at my telepathic brother and nodded, getting my lime green Moleskine and No. 2 pencil out. “Right. So, um, I can’t call you Orc Dude all night. What’s your name, sir?”

The orc blinked his yellow eyes at me and then aimed them at my brother, seeming to instinctively understand that Wes would be our conduit.

 Wesley said, “BugBelly.”

“That’s not really his name,” I said.

“That’s what he’s showing me,” Wesley objected. “Technically, they look like cockroaches and ants.” He squinted at the orc’s forehead as though he could see right through the comically large hat and straight into his brain. “Yeah, bugs. All kinds. On a big, hairy stomach. BugBelly.”

I lowered my voice. “If I call him BugBelly and he reaches across this table and thwaps me dead, I’m going to haunt your ass for centuries.” Then I cast a close-lipped smile at the orc. “Nice to meet you, BugBelly. You’re the first orc I’ve ever spoken to, so please forgive me if I accidentally say something you find rude. I don’t wish to offend. I’m eager for this opportunity.”

He nodded.

I continued, “The Orc Quarter has emptied, and someone set it on fire. When orcs leave to make a new home, they raze the old one. It’s your custom, yes?”

BugBelly gave another vigorous nod.

“Let’s talk about the reason behind your fleeing,” I said. “What makes an entire orc community up and run away? The police officers said you might have something important to tell me about that.”

He leaned forward, and that giant, crease-covered forehead got alarmingly close to mine. A waft of his scent came to me, sun-warmed fur and copper. I did my best not to flinch despite an instinctual urge to keep distance between us. Self-preservation alarm bells were clanging in my head.

Wesley said, “Angels.”

I considered my brother. From where I sat, I could only see the right side of his face, the side untouched by holy water scars. His focus was entirely on the orc, his expression one of wonderment; his pupil shrank to a pinprick in that Husky dog blue that was wilting rapidly to pale violet. Fascinated by whatever it was he was hearing in the orc’s head, Wesley forgot I was there, though his lips moved constantly to report what he was picking up whenever it was clear enough.

“Angels,” he said. “No,
one
angel. Dark angel. Wings of false feathers. He has visions. Marnie?”

“I’m here,” I said quietly.

“Marnie, he’s a mystic. A prophet for his tribe. He’s not interested in what’s happening in the Orc Quarter. He stayed because he has a message for you. A prophecy.”

“Of doom?”

“What?” Wesley blinked rapidly and jerked out of his telepathic daze.

“Is it a prophecy of doom?” I drummed my pencil on the table. “Generally, those are the worst.”

I thought I made a fair point, but BugBelly and Wesley glared at me in unison.

“Okay, can we focus on what happened in the Orc Quarter first and then discuss the prophecy, doom-y or otherwise?” I asked, glancing at the round, black eye of the video equipment in the upper corner of the room. “The police need to understand why the orcs vacated so suddenly. Is something wrong?”

“They’re connected,” Wesley said.  “Also, he needs to warn you that the mummy’s honey pot smells like ass.”

I did a double-take. “Wait, where? What mummy? Honey pot? What the—”

“I don’t know,” Wes said with a surprised laugh. “That can’t be right. I’m seeing a pot.”

Canopic jars. They held the deceased’s organs. Lacking the exact nature of the pot, Wes’s telepathic vision must be showing him the closest thing in its available catalog of images.

He continued, “BugBelly thinks you should prepare for it. Brace yourself. Prepare your nose. But don’t hesitate, don’t linger, be quick about it. Something about the full moon. Honey moon? No, that’s not right.”

Prepare your nose? I’d worn a gas mask for cases before, in a mine in Colorado, where a necromancer was experimenting with hybrid zombies. The stink down there had been pretty powerful. A mummy’s tomb, I imagined, would be fairly dry, and logically less funky. This was moot, since I had no plans to venture into a mummy’s tomb to begin with. My luck, I’d get the curse. My old chemistry partner from McGill University got a mummy’s curse once. It wasn’t pretty. The best way to avoid the mummy’s curse is to avoid mummies. Q.E.D.

“Something is coming,” Wes reported, sinking back into BugBelly’s willing, open mind. “A ship. First a scout ship. Then a fleet. Hordes of the enemy. Ancient drums. Made of manflesh. Songs of the Devourer.”

“We have an enemy?”
Dammit, I knew it was a prophecy of doom
.
Why can’t it ever be a prophecy of cupcakes?

“The orcs do. A natural enemy. Something that once preyed upon them as a food source.”

My years in a preternatural biology lab came rushing back to me far more easily than usual; I had visions of preserved bodies dredged up from bogs kept in massive glass cases for study. Carnivores with a particular taste for human and orc meat, their gangly, branch-like arms and dark, mottled skin perfectly camouflaged with the primeval forests of the Taiga. “There are no more Ninespine Stickleback trolls. They went extinct in the eleventh century.”

“No,” Wes reported, studying the orc’s gleaming brow. “They were hunted
almost
to extinction and the survivors were… encouraged to relocate north, beyond the portal.”

I had so many questions about that that I didn’t know where to begin. “Hunted by whom? Where? How? Why? What portal?”

“But they’re returning,” he continued. “The portal is failing. The portal is slipping away. Away into madness and chaos. All is lost… lost in sea foam and frost fog and the cries of war. Vengeance. The illusion of dominance must not waver.”

“How can a portal go mad?” I asked. “I mean, other than GlaDOS. She's a stone-cold bitch.”

Wesley shook his head and BugBelly made a frustrated noise from the back of his throat.

My brother moaned. “The scout. Bathing in man-blood. Shaking his face in it.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” was all I could think to say.

“Roasted, eaten. Flesh chewed from bones,” Wesley reported, and his pale hands became shaking fists against the table. I reached over and covered his hands with my gloved ones in an attempt to soothe the dismay radiating off him.

“Sooooo, a handful of trolls sailing back through a portal that may fail, so they can chew on some humans…” I said. “What, like fifteen, twenty trolls? If we need to, Batten and I could put together a team to hunt them.”

“Not a handful,” Wesley said through parched lips. “Hundreds of thousands. They’ve been reproducing for centuries in preparation for their chance to reclaim their homeland and avenge their ancestors.”