Chapter Text
This wasn’t how he had planned his evening. It wasn’t, to be honest, how he had planned this whole fucking week. He had asked himself a hundred times already what he was doing here and even if the answer was, right now, Fighting For Your Life, it wasn’t really a satisfactorily one.
One of three attackers had jumped on him from behind, but letting himself fall flat onto his back gave Anders enough room to pull out his pistol, whip it up and put a bullet into the other man’s head. Two others were now approaching him and yet another was trying to beat the crap out of the tall stranger, who was giving him a pretty hard time, however.
Anders jumped onto his feet, grabbed his hat and put it back on before kicking the gun out of the first man’s hand and putting a bullet into his face as well.
“Your fly is undone,” he said to the other approaching thug.
The man stopped short and looked down at himself, and Anders shot him where he stood. Shaking his head, Anders now pulled one of the throwing knives from his belt and after a short, careful aim, planted it into the back of thug #4. As the latter slowly folded into a heap, the dark-haired stranger joined him, clutching his abdomen with a groan.
Rolling his shoulders and adjusting his fedora, Anders stepped over the corpse of thug #3 and approached the other man.
He looked down at the figure with a mop of black curls, who was moaning softly while trying to get up from where he had landed, and stowed away his pistol.
Helping a damsel in distress, even if that damsel happened to be a man, wasn’t really on his to-do list, but he couldn’t have possibly ignored the fact that said male damsel had been attacked by four thugs with masks in a back alley in one of the shadiest parts of Bucharest.
“You all right, mate?”
Rolling onto his back the other man groaned and dragged a hand down his face. “Don't know.”
Anders offered the man his hand and he took it to let himself be helped onto his feet again.
“Thanks.”
Anders mustered Tall, Dark, and Handsome and adjusted his fedora. Just as he was about to make his farewell again, because who expected a thank you anyway, the other man spun around, eyes wide in panic.
“Shit, where is it?”
“What?”
“My bag!” Running both hands through his dark curls, the stranger began to look hastily around. “Shit! No...” Only to fall onto his knees with a gasp of relief when he found the black messenger bag next to a bin in an unlit corner. “Thank fuck!”
A few papers had slid out of said bag and the man looked up at Anders, eyebrows drawn together, then hastily stuffed those into the bag again that he quickly closed.
“Look, I...” He began. “Thank you for saving my arse. I really should've known better.”
“Known what better?” Anders hooked his thumbs into his belt.
“I... I just... I kinda asked the wrong people the wrong questions. I was... I was supposed to meet someone here, but I guess that kind of backfired.”
“Oh, that's the game, is it?”
Tall, Dark and Handsome looked up again and got onto his feet. “Game?”
“Because I was supposed to meet someone here as well.”
“Oh.”
The two stared at each other for a moment before the curly haired stranger tried to smile.
“Dr Anders Johnson?”
“The very same.” Anders extended his hand. “So…”
“Mitchell.” He took Anders's hand and shook it with a firm grip. “John Mitchell, but everyone calls me Mitchell.”
Anders nodded and had a look around. “I guess this isn't the best place to have a chat, so we'd better relocate.”
“I have to admit I'm a bit at a loss as to my surroundings.”
“You what?”
Mitchell shrugged apologetically. “I've been running for fuck knows how long after I realised those guys were after me. I mean... if it had been one or two, I would've made a stand, but five?”
“Hang on, five?”
“Uh, yes?”
“Shit.”
Mitchell hastily looked around. “What?”
“Because I offed four, which means one of them got away.”
“Shit...” Pressing the bag to his chest, Mitchell looked around again. “Fuck!”
“Let's get out of here.”
“Right behind you.”
Anders and his new-found companion headed towards the better lit streets, and managed to flag down a taxi. None of them spoke a word during the ride back to the hotel where Anders was staying. Not the best part of town, he couldn't afford that, but certainly not as shady as the neighbourhood where he had picked Mitchell up.
Once up in his room, Anders put down his hat and crossed his arms.
“Out with it. Why am I here in Bucharest in a fucking hotel with cockroaches under the bed, and not in my apartment in Auckland?”
Mitchell took a deep breath and opened the bag from which he produced a stack of papers.
“Did you bring it?”
The day had started like any other. But on his way to his office, Anders got a phone call from his brother.
“What do you want?”
“You need to come to the library,” his brother Ty said. “The vault has been broken into and it looks as if at least one book has been destroyed.”
“Oh for fuck's sake.”
Twenty minutes in a taxi later Anders was at the library, and with a nod for the head librarian he passed her desk and swiped the key card past the sensor, after a nod from the police officer guarding the door. The door opened and closed behind him again with a soft hiss.
Hurrying down the stairs, Anders wondered how and why anyone would break into the vault of a library that wasn't even two hundred years old. The only things down here were shelves and shelves of old newspapers and magazines, and a few books that were too ratty and old to still be lent out but which no one wanted to throw away. And, of course, a few locked cabinets with ancient originals, treasures of history.
Ty, looking smart in his officer's uniform as usual, was already there and was impatiently waiting for him.
“So.” Anders had a look around. “What happened?”
“The security alarm went off at four this morning,” Ty explained. “One of the shelves in the back has been emptied rather violently, but there wasn't a trace of damage on the door, and the lock hasn't been hacked either.”
“So whoever it was had a key card, but didn't have access to the main office to deactivate the movement sensors down here.”
“That's what it looks like.”
Anders had a look around and unsurprisingly, it had been one of the locked cabinets that had been emptied. Books were strewn haphazardly all over the place, and it made Anders sad and angry to see books treated that way.
Two other officers had fenced the area of,f and Anders and Ty ducked under the barrier tape to get closer to the cabinet.
“History and Pagan Beliefs,” Anders muttered after looking at the head of the cabinet. “What the fuck?”
With Ty's help he carefully gathered the fallen books up, and stacked them onto the nearest table. There were a lot of lose pages, but when Anders began to gather them it became clear they were all of the same book. It was then that his eyes fell onto a single book half hidden behind the shelf, lying open and face down and looking as if it had been thrown there. It had hardly any pages left.
Anders inspected the cover. “Myths and Legends of Northern Europe during the Centuries.”
Ty crossed his arms and frowned. “Why would anyone tear that book apart like that?”
“I have no idea.”
Anders began to gather the torn pages, his heart bleeding at the magnitude of damage done to the old, brittle paper. It took him quite some time until he had reassembled the pages. Sure enough, there was one missing page.
Anders carefully leafed through the lose sheets, a few pages back and a few pages ahead. “This is the section of mythical plants and creatures.”
“So? Was someone looking for a magic stick?”
“A magic stick to increase your virility?”
“It's always about virility with you.”
“It's a valid assumption, as people through all the ages and regions have always looked for ways to increase either the size and/or the performance of their dicks.”
Ty rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“So.” Anders looked at the index and frowned. “The section in question is about the Yggdrasil.”
“The what?”
“The mythical tree of life, the centre of the universe, as the Vikings believed.”
Ty's frown deepened. “I still don't get why whoever wanted this page didn't just borrow the book.”
“If you want to borrow a book you need to have a card with your name on.”
“Right.”
“Do you have the name of the holder of that key card?”
“We do, but so far we couldn't get in touch.”
Anders nodded thoughtfully and shut the book. Something about that book and the missing page, or rather the section of which the page was missing, tugged at his memory. He felt as if he had seen this book before, so a check of his own library in the office was worth a try.
“As far as I can see now nothing else is missing,” Anders said. “Just a single page from a single book.”
“Strange. Probably some nutcase from a weird sect,” Ty mused. “Like those druid freaks at Stonehenge.”
Anders emitted a vaguely confirmatory noise and put the poor, violated book down again. It would be a piece of evidence so he couldn't take it with him.
Later in his office, Anders went through all the bookshelves, watched by a very bemused Dawn who was sorting essays to be marked.
“There you are,” he muttered as he pulled an old, ratty book out from under a stack of even older books.
His phone rang, and it was Ty again.
“We found him.”
“Who?”
“The holder of the key card.”
“And?”
“Just a clerk working at the library,” Ty said slowly. “We found him in his home. His throat had been torn out.”
Anders was at a loss for words.
“Needless to say, we couldn't find his card anywhere.”
“No surprise, really.”
Well, that was getting weird. Anders sat down at the desk and leafed through the pages until he found the one that had been torn out of the one in the library. His was only a copy, but he made it himself so he could rely on its accuracy.
It was a drawing of the Yggdrasil, together with a text of Viking runes in Old Norse. It was a script he had never seen anywhere else, and it had worked for three years trying to wrestle a meaning out if it. The runes were tiny, so Anders put on his glasses and squinted at the page, dotting down notes as he translated the words. Again. He had never given them much notice and had put the cryptic meaning down to him having failed to decipher the runes correctly.
“Of Ravinsfjord and...” There was a long blank space “...find the third root.”
He put down the glasses with narrowing eyes. Someone had taken the page that might contain a description as to where to find the Yggdrasil, a tree of legends. Or rather, a part of the description, by the way it looked. And it had been important enough to kill someone to get it.
When Anders came home that night, he found an envelope without a sender on in his post box. Frowning, he took it upstairs and after closing the door behind him, he dropped the rest of the post onto the table and opened the envelope.
Dr Johnson
Someone is looking for something that does not belong in the mortal realm. I know you're the world's leading expert in Norse history, so you're the only one who can help me to prevent that information from falling into the wrong hands. Contact me. Keyword is Bragi.
There was a number with a country code Anders didn't recognise, and he sat down and stared at the letter for a long time while rubbing his hand across his chin.
In the end, he picked up his phone and dialled the number.
“Yes.”
“Bragi.”
There was a long pause.
“Do you have an issue of Legends and Myths of Northern Europe during the Centuries?”
“I do have an issue of Myths and Legends of Northern Europe during the Centuries.”
“Of thank god.”
“Come again?”
“Only two of each of these issues have ever been written, you know that?”
“No, I didn't know that.”
“We have to meet.”
“Do we?”
“Yes. I think I know how to find a certain tree.”
“And?”
“And only you can help me find it. And we have to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.”
“Yes, you mentioned that in your note.”
“Do you have any idea what anyone could do with an artefact this powerful?”
“How do you even know there is an artefact?”
“I don't know exactly, but I have a few people on my tail who think it exists, and that I know where to find it.”
“On your tail?”
“Well... I think I have given them the slip.”
“Hence the secrecy with the note and everything.”
“Yes.”
“You are aware that if such a thing exists then it has to be protected at all costs? The historical and scientific value of that find would be impossible to evaluate.”
“Why do you think I contacted you?”
“Where do I find you?”
“Bucharest.”
“Bucharest.”
“Yes. Bring the book.”
The call was ended on the other side. A few minutes later Anders received a text with an address.
Anders leaned back and closed his eyes. It was unimaginable to fathom what that tree, if it indeed existed, could mean for mankind. And equally unfathomable what catastrophic damage might be done if it indeed fell into the wrong hands.
The very next day, Anders asked Dawn to book a flight to Bucharest.
Anders reached into the inner pocket of his utility vest and produced the book. Mitchell's eyes widened and he hastily dug into his bag, spilling papers everywhere. After some shuffling and searching, he produced a sheet of paper with a drawing of a tree and some Viking runes. It wasn't a torn out page but a copy of it, and it looked pretty much the same as the one Anders had looked at in his own book.
“Here, that's my side of the story,” Mitchell said. “Though I wasn't able to take the book, but I could copy the page in question. It’s all I got.”
“And why couldn't you take the book?”
Mitchell looked up. “I was in a real hurry, mate. Those guys are not to be trifled with and believe me, they kept a really close eye on that book.”
Anders closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Crazy Nazis?”
“No.” Mitchell's voice was dark. “Vampires.”
Anders couldn't suppress a snort.
“Don't believe me?”
“I find it a bit hard to swallow, yes.” Anders crossed his arms. “Vampires.”
“Vampires.”
“And what would vampires want with the Yggdrasil?”
“I... uh... I'm just... a means to an end. But when I realised what they were after, I managed to get away.”
“From vampires.”
Mitchell met his eyes. “You don't believe me.”
“As I said, it's a bit hard to swallow.”
Mitchell didn't look happy and ran both hands through his hair. He was wearing ratty, green, knitted, fingerless gloves, Anders discovered, and he had rarely seen a piece of clothing more unappealing and ugly.
Their eyes met.
“So.” Anders looked at the papers. “So you ran away from mythical creatures to prevent them from finding a mythical tree that only exists in legends.”
“Pretty much.”
“That's one crazy story, mister.”
“I swear it’s true!”
“Hm.”
Not that Anders was actually one to talk, being a living incarnation of a Norse god and everything, so he was going to give the other man the benefit of doubt. Which begged the question if that keyword he had been given had been sheer chance. He decided to keep that under the radar for now, though, and try to discover how much the other one actually knew.
“If I so decide, for the sake of argument, that you are not a nutcase and it is mythical beings we are dealing with,” Anders began ad picked up the copied sheet. “Back to the reason of us being here talking about those mythical beings.”
Mitchell reached for the book and gave Anders a questioning look. He nodded, and Mitchell opened the book and leafed through the pages until he found the one with the Yggdrasil.
“I have studied these things for years and I have all reason to believe that we have half a code each,” he said.
Anders sat down beside him, took his glasses out of the front pocket and put them on.
“Yours,” Mitchell began. “What does it say?”
“Of Ravinsfjord and find the third root.”
Mitchell nodded. “I can more or less read Old Norse, but I’ve never encountered that particular script before... but someone was convinced that this is the other half.”
“And since some poor bloke in Auckland died for that piece of information it'd better be important.”
Mitchell stared at Anders with widening eyes. “They were already in Auckland?”
“What do you mean, already?”
“I... uh...” Mitchell swallowed. “I heard them talk about the trail of the other book, and it leads to New Zealand. I thought that was a wrong trail, but apparently... apparently I was wrong.”
Anders took a deep breath.
After a pause in which Mitchell became more and more uncomfortable, Anders finally picked up the copied sheet. Sure enough, the same type of runes, the same tiny script.
“Three days north,” he read. “East of Tjonnholdstind and in Midgard.”
“It is the second half,” Mitchell breathed.
Anders picked up a pencil and filled the runes from his book into the spaces of the ones on the copied page. Then he wrote the translated sentence underneath.
Mitchell eagerly leaned forward. “Three days north of Ravinsfjord,” he read. “And east of Tjonnholdstind, find the third root in Midgard. ”
“Tjonnholdstind is a mountain in the Norwegian Fjells,” Anders said thoughtfully.
“Which means we have to go to Norway.”
His eyebrows rising, Anders looked up. “Do we?”
“If we want to stop them we have to be there before them!”
“Again, point. But how do we stop vampires, and fuck knows how many of them, exactly?”
“We will stop them.”
“We and what army?”
Mitchell fidgeted.
“So?”
Mitchell fidgeted some more.
“Out with it. What is it that you're not telling me?”
“I kind of...” Mitchell sighed. “I kind of hoped that your god powers could take care of that.”
“So it wasn't a fluke after all.” Anders felt anger rise in his guts. “Where do you know that from?”
“I heard them talk about it,” Mitchell said defensively. “And I kinda...”
“Listen.” Anders pinched the bridge of his nose again. “I may be a vessel of a Norse god, but these gods haven't been in Asgard for a while and are rather weak. In short, our powers rather suck. All I can do is convince people, and I mostly use it to get people into my bed and rid of them again.”
Mitchell gave him a look of badly concealed disgust.
“Deal with it. Long story short, I don't have any godly powers. And what little I have only works on mortals, mate, so I guess your vampires are out of the question, too.”
“But...”
“But what?”
“But I heard...”
“Spit it the fuck out!”
“I heard the Yggdrasil can enhance and channel your powers!”
Anders stared at the man in bafflement, then he had to laugh.
“And what do you think will happen then? I am Bragi, god of poetry! Am I supposed to serenade them with songs and poems until I bore them to death? Oh... I can't even do that, because they're dead already!”
Mitchell swallowed.
“I see your plan wasn't really thought through.”
“I know.” Mitchell's face darkened. “I was grabbing every straw.”
“And what makes you so desperate to get to that tree before the other vampires?”
“I told you that it would...”
“So far you haven't really told me much, and I ask you to rectify that.”
After a long sigh, Mitchell leaned back.
“What those... people who... I was working for... found out is that the Yggdrasil, the tree of life, could magnify... their powers, but being as they are powers of darkness, it would enable them to... ah... they believe they can turn people into vampires without having to bite them and feed them our blood. That's what they think, at least.”
“And where do you come in?”
“I... I just... I heard that...”
Anders waited.
“It is the tree of life, right?” Mitchell lifted his hands. “The knowledge I had about the tree is that it cures all illnesses, heals all wound, and restores life force. I don’t want to have... vampires access to that sort of... power!”
“And?”
“And what?”
“No ulterior motive?”
Mitchell took a deep breath and his eyebrows drew together. “I want to stop them. Isn’t that motive enough?”
For a long moment, the two just looked at each other.
“So the vampires want to use it to turn everyone into a vampire?”
“Pretty much. I think they planned on leaving enough people human though, to have a reliable source of food.”
Anders pulled a face. “You know,” he said after a moment. “If that is true, do you have any idea how valuable that thing is for mankind? How many lives you could save with it? You could get rid of every plague and... God!”
“I know. And at the same time, it could bring about the end of mankind, if in the wrong hands.”
Anders took a deep breath. “I am beginning to understand. And yes. We need to protect this tree. We need to make it available to science and humanity.”
“Maybe we should just erase every trace of its existence. I think it is too powerful an artefact to belong into mortal hands.”
Anders looked back at the runes before him with a thoughtful frown. A time bomb. This piece of information was a fucking time bomb. And yes, Mitchell was right. They had to stop the vampires somehow, so the tree could be used for the benefit of mankind.
“Whatever you decide,” Mitchell said slowly. “I'm going to find that tree.”
Picking up the sheet, Anders frowned and pursed his lips. Then he looked at Mitchell again.
“Will you help me?”
After a moment's thought, Anders realised he couldn't possibly say no to that.
“Just one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why Bucharest?”
This time, it was Mitchell who rolled his eyes. “Because vampires are traditionalists and have a stronghold in the Transylvanian Alps.”
Anders had to grin. “Good, as long as we're steering free of any clichés.” Then his grin died. “But that also means they could still be on our tails, right? Being as one of the guys who were after you escaped.”
Mitchell bit his lips. “I guess we'd better get going then.”
“Oslo?”
“Oslo.”
They left Bucharest with the first plane they could get tickets for the next day.