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CHAPTER Four

I stood in the middle of the convention floor, blinking rapidly. Murky shapes moved at the edge of my vision. Hunkering behind my shield, I turned in a slow circle, preparing for an attack that never came. Ghostly moans reached my ears. My feet shuffled through the fallen bones of my assailants, but for now, it didn’t seem like anyone else was going to take a try at biting my face off. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the harsh fluorescent lighting.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of dead people. Con-goers stood around numbly staring at the destruction. A couple of them were hurt, especially the ones I had . . . ahem . . . interacted with. The big guy in the clever T-shirt had a bloody nose, but there was no sign of the gash in his neck or the ruination of his hand. Natural 20s sat on the floor nearby, spitting bits of leather out of her mouth. Everytime I took a step or turned around, there was a plastic clattering sound at my feet. A pile of plastic skeleton bones covered the floor, wrapped up in a cheap acetate cloak that was frayed at the edges. I went to one knee to stir through Edgelord’s faux remains. The stitching on the cloak was poorly done. The skull was just a volleyball with a cheap child’s Halloween mask stapled to it. I picked it up and stared at the hollow eye sockets, and wondered what had become of my enemy.

“John? Are you alright?” Chesa was just standing up. There was a silvery mark on her neck, kind of like frostbite, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. She looked around with a slack look on her face. “What the hell happened?”

“Wish I knew. Captain Tatertot turned into a pile of bones, then the valkyrie flew away with him . . . ” I turned to her and pointed at the ceiling. “A VALKYRIE, by the way! I thought we were supposed to have some kind of treaty with the valkyries!”

“Totenschreck,” Tembo said, getting stiffly to his feet. He was staring at his hand, opening and closing his fist. “Terror of the dead, I think. Esther will know.” He took a deep breath, letting it out in a slow whistle. “I saw the end, my friends. I saw what stands beyond the gates of Gravehome.”

“What? You died?”

“I walked the final path, yes,” Tembo said. “I suspect we all did. And yet here we are. Puzzling.”

“Where’d that bastard go?” Gregory d’Hernia kicked up to his feet, the maneuver ruined by the piles of plastic bones that littered the floor. He slid gracelessly back and forth for several heartbeats, then sidestepped into a display table of novelty dice-shaped candles. Gregory planted his fist into a dodecahedron of beeswax and started swearing.

“He’s gone, hero-man,” I said. “Everything’s back to normal.”

“No, it’s not,” Chesa said. “These people are going to need debriefing, and someone’s going to have to file a lot of paperwork. But I think we’re done here. We need to get back to MA”—Mundane Actual, our headquarters—“and talk to Esther. She’ll know what to do.”

“What? We drove off the weird cloaked figure with the skeleton-making sword,” I said. “That feels like a win to me.”

“It feels like we stopped something terrible, yes. But I don’t think it’s over. Not by a long shot.”

“I agree with Chesa,” Tembo said. “A blade that kills with a touch, and skeletons, and zombified mundanes. Our morbid assailant was trying to enter the Unreal, just like your friend Eric. We stopped him for now, but that will not be the end of it. He will try again.”

“So we watch the Actuator. When he makes a run for the gates of reality again, we show up and put him down,” I said. “Straightforward.”

“Hey, we need to talk.” It was the guard from the door, pudgy hands on pudgy hips and a very cross look on his face. “I don’t know how you got fog machines and several hundred plastic skeletons past our rigorous security, but someone’s going to have to pay for all this damage. And those swords need peace knots!”

“I’m sure this will cover the damages,” Bethany said, stepping out of the crowd. She handed the guard a wrinkled stack of dollar bills. “We’re part of an . . . Internet . . . influencer? Consortium?”

“Well, I . . . I think . . . ” He stared down at the cash in his hand with confusion. “This is a lot of money.”

“Yes! Very real money, too,” Bethany said with the brightest, fakest smile I had ever seen. She turned to us. “And now I think we really must be going.”

Bethany looped an arm around me and Chesa, then hurried toward the exit. People were definitely staring at us. I leaned down to Bethany’s ear.

“Not real money?”

“No, no, it is. It’s just the money from the till. And maybe his wallet. And a few other wallets from the crowd. Folks were distracted,” she answered. “So we really should hurry.”

“We were fighting skeletons and zombies, and you were looting the bodies?” Gregory asked sharply.

“Rogues gonna rogue,” she said sweetly. “Come on, paladin-boy. A little hop in your step. That pretty smile isn’t going to fool anyone for long.”


I was getting used to the smell of foot cheese. It’s a necessary emotional callus to develop when your main mode of transportation is a flying Viking longboat made of toenail clippings. On hot days, the deck of the Naglfr smelled like a foot-slapping contest. And that’s a contest no one wins. No one.

We were flying high above the endless cornfields that surround Mundane Actual. The boss discovered a long time ago that everywhere in America was within five minutes of a cornfield, at least metaphorically, and actual proximity to the husky starch helped the Actuator tap into the country’s mythical gestalt. It also meant random folks were less likely to stumble across the threshold and contaminate the sensitive anachronisms that ran the operation. But it also meant we lived in a cornfield.

The mood in the boat was sour. We had been properly beaten back at the Mickleville Community Center and Swim Park. Even if our healer had been there, it wouldn’t have mattered. This weird Totenschreck character had beaten us all with little more than a touch, then escaped on the wings of a valkyrie who had otherwise stayed out of the fight. There was a lot to be sour about.

We arrived home with our foul mood firmly in place. Mundane Actual, our center of operations as well as the portal into our various mythical domains, is housed beneath a lake in the middle of nowhere. My theory is that it used to be a missile silo, but Esther won’t let me wander around unattended. Mostly because I break technology just by being close to it, and there’s a lot of technology in the silo. Heck, I even have to take the stairs, for fear of plummeting to my death when the elevator stops . . . elevating, I guess? The point is that I’d already had a long day, and there were about a thousand steps between me and anything that vaguely resembled a comfortable bed.

I was saved from this fate by Esther MacRae. The Naglfr descended through the waters of the lake (a process akin to gargling rotten cottage cheese) and settled into the underground dock that housed all the magical vessels at the disposal of Knight Watch. Esther was waiting for us on the pier. She had a clipboard in one hand and a revolver-style grenade launcher in the other. The grenade launcher didn’t bother me. Fondling the safety mechanism on a grenade launcher is how Esther let you know she cared enough to provide suppressive fire at the drop of a hat. It was the clipboard that gave me pause. Nothing quite as dangerous as the boss with a checklist to fill out. As the gangway rattled against the pier, Esther slung the launcher over her shoulder and produced a pencil.

A very sharp pencil. I swallowed the bile that instantly bubbled up into the back of my throat and started down the plank.

“You can hold it right there, Rast,” Esther said. She peered at me with cold green eyes. “New protocol for Ren faires. Gotta make sure we don’t have another disaster like that business with Kracek.” The dragon I killed. Have I mentioned that? I killed a dragon. “I’m still filling out the paperwork for that one. Did you know his wife has filed ten wrongful slay claims against you?” She scratched a note in the corner of her clipboard. “Need to put some kind of language in the boilerplate that limits our exposure on any heroic action taken before induction into Knight Watch. These lawyers are costing us a fortune.”

“Lawyers? You guys use lawyers for this stuff?”

“What else would we use? Courts don’t recognize the Danelaw anymore, especially in the US, and demons are a bitch to work with. Always putting tricky business in the fine print. Okay, let’s go over the checklist.” She looked up at me, pencil at the ready. “Kill anything?”

“Yes. But—”

“No buts.” She ticked a box on her sheet. “Mundane or mythic?”

“Not really sure,” I said.

“You think you’d have the hang of this by now. Did it glow, emit tentacles, utter dark vows, consume inanimate objects, speak in high chant . . . ?” She scanned the rest of her sheet and looked back at me. “This is kind of a long list, Rast. Am I getting warm?”

“I want to amend my previous statement. I did not kill anything.”

“No?”

“Nope,” I said. “Except for this creepy edgelord-looking guy.”

“So yes?”

“Yes. Except he didn’t die. He disappeared, and then the valkyrie flew off with him.”

“A valkyrie flew off with a noble of the edge realms?” Esther asked.

“A what? No, an edgelord. You know, like . . . ” I made a brooding face and pulled my tabard over my head so it looked like a hood. “They brood a lot. Get real mean on the Internet. An edgelord!”

“Well, whatever you say about this guy dying or not, the Actuator picked up a lot of mythic deaths in the area, and considering I’ve got a full head count of elites standing in front of me—”

“No, no, that was us,” Chesa said. “We died. All of us but John.”

“You . . . died?”

“Yes, Captain MacRae,” Tembo said solemnly. “We have walked the final path and come back again. It was harrowing.”

“Did the Saint show up or something? None of you look dead.”

“Super observant,” I said. “But no, Matthew never showed up. But when I knocked the creepy dude’s teeth in, they . . . un-died?” I described the fight as quickly and clearly as I could, ignoring Gregory’s dismissive snort at my depiction of his utter and humiliating defeat, ending with the valkyrie gathering the man-child in his arms and flying away. “So that’s what happened,” I finished.

“Okay, so . . . guy with gothic sword manifests necromantic powers, kills most of the team with a single touch of aforementioned gothic sword, raises a bunch of skeletons and then, when defeated, escapes in the arms of a valkyrie,” Esther said. “Do I have that right?”

“Correct,” I said.

“Very well.” She scanned her sheet, turned the page, then made a single check mark. “Now if you’d just sign and verify for the record.”

“You had a single checkbox for all that?” I asked.

“More or less.” Esther turned the clipboard around and handed it to me, along with the pencil of +2 sharpness. There was a place for me to sign and date at the bottom. I scanned the page. The only mark was next to a single word:

Ragnarok.


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