Walk Among Us by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062994066
Google: uS35DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-05-03T23:00:00+00:00

Except he did not.

Instead Duke staggered down again to the main street, head stooped, parka clutched in a blue-veined hand. He had lost a glove in the last assault by the wind and given up, at that point, on parroting human sensibility. Let the locals think he was impaired by drink or drug, that he was inviting hypothermia and frostbite on behalf of an inadvisable vice. He was too tired to care.

The snow built until it gained a luminescence of its own, washed with lights from the shops of Laugavegur: a mottling of halogen gold on solid white, the frilled spar of the city’s largest church a distant shadow. It was pleasant in its inhospitable fashion: starkly, bleakly magnificent, true to every Nordic detective series Duke had watched. But the storm continued to churn, and soon it became ice and the flicker of streetlights.

We’re watching, the note had said.

Duke wondered how closely.

“Seven Nation Army” boomed through a door as it swung open an inch from Duke’s nose, spilling two women in enormous coats, the material fringed with piebald fur. There was the smell of cheap liquor worked into the grain of even cheaper wood: the universal attar of any dive bar, and Duke, starving, badly in need of a win, eased past the women and into the establishment. Lucky for Duke, it was dark enough to camouflage the poor state of his clothing, and too crowded with drunks for anyone to pay attention anyway. The ceilings were low, and the single dance floor teemed with bodies: most young, every one of them effortlessly lithe. Duke wanted a drink so badly, he’d have wrung a dishrag dry for a drop. Not that he could any longer.

But, maybe, this was the place to harvest something better.

The hunger writhed in him, urging him forward, onward, keep going, keep going, a compass erratically realigning to the north of what he needed. He could taste it, almost. That precise—what had Orri said?—libation, yeah, the bestial appetite inside him coveted. Duke couldn’t put a name to it yet, but he knew he was close, close enough.

His elbow grazed the swoop of a woman’s bare spine and he jumped as though singed, pivoting awkwardly in the tight space, a tottering diagonal half step nearly leading him into a collision with a man. But the man caught Duke with a laugh and a hand applied to the divot of his shoulder blade.

“Hey, it’s the American,” said the man with glee, and it took Duke a second to tether the voice to a name.

“Sven,” said Duke. “How ya doing?” He was genuinely glad to see him for a reason he couldn’t yet parse.

“Can’t complain. Alcohol on all the shelves. Pretty girls all around. A new friend found again. Life could be worse, you know?”

A warm smile bled onto Duke’s face, slow in its conception, sudden in its growth. Sven clapped Duke’s arm, his own grin making for a matching set. And despite everything that had happened, optimism kindled in Duke.

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