The Bragi

“I’m what your people once were.”

“You mean you were human?”

“No.” She looks at me, her eyes older than her twenty something face. “I am more than that. Humans used to be like I am, but they chose to live in this world, to give up their special ‘traits.’ There were some who wanted to live in a world without the monsters we live with. In order to be granted that desire, they had to give up their immortality.

I blow out a breath. “Can I choose to go back to being immortal?”

“You’d want to live forever in that form?”

Bitch. I want to claw her eyes out, but the twin swords gleaming in the moonlight over her shoulder give me pause. “Why should your race be immortal while the rest of us constantly live with death hovering over us? What makes you more special than us?”

Before I can even blink, she’s pushed her face into mine. “You don’t think I live with the threat of death? You don’t think I know what it is to lose someone I love?” Just as quickly, she pulls away from me and stiffens. “You humans are too small-minded to see beyond yourselves. All you can think to do is whine that we have a unique makeup that allows us to survive for years beyond your abilities. At least, we have the potential to live longer. When there’s peace. But I haven’t lived long enough to see peace. And I’ve lived a long time.” She lifts her eyes to the darkened sky. And breathes. “Of course we can die. It just takes more than a human to kill us.” Her eyes find mine. “You should be asking me why we live? What purpose do Bragi serve? Why would The Creator make us stronger than humans, faster, and more durable? What are we here to fight?”

I swallow, trying to ignore my stupidity and pettiness. A scream pierces the night. She turns her head, listening. I hear nothing. But she does. Her eyes narrow. “Run,” she whispers as she pulls two knives from her boots. Moving without a sound, she presses her back into the slimy brick wall and turns toward the howl that follows more screams.

I turn to run. And turn again. And again. We’re at the end of an alley. There’s nowhere to go. She looks at me standing there like a fool. “At least hide yourself,” she hisses.

Scrambling, I leap into a pile of garbage. The heat from the decomposition is suffocating. Black plastic sticks to my skin, wrapping me in and pulling me down farther and farther. My head starts pounding. My chest constricts so tight I feel my heart hitting my ribs. To hell with hiding. I claw wildly at the refuse. Out, I have to get out. Cold, smooth metal skims my cheek. I freeze.

“Stop moving.” Her  voice is barely more than the blowing wind. Petit arms reach around me, lifting me out of my feculent grave. She puts her finger to her lips. Low growling moves closer. The stink of the garbage is nothing compared to the whiff of…of what? A wet something lands on my shoulder and slides down my arm. I don’t want to look. I shouldn’t look. I know I won’t like what I find. But I look anyway. Slowly, I raise my eyes. The night sky is gone. In its stead, a gaping maw hovers three stories above. Jagged, black teeth, as long as my entire body, point down at me. It covers the expanse of the small alley we’re standing in. I don’t even scream. I can’t.

She seems grateful for my silence. Her firm hand on my shoulder tells me to stay. Two silent steps away from me, she launches herself at the crumbling building to our left.  She lands two stories up, striking the vertical surface with her powerful legs, propelling herself higher. The thing above swivels its head. Too slow. Her blades reach its throat, sinking deep. As she begins to fall, she pulls her arms apart, severing the monster’s neck. I jump behind a wooden pallet, the only protection I can find from the falling head. A billow of dirt and dust from the roofs above are all I know about the body. There is a lot of dirt and dust. With a head as large as the alley, the body must be even more enormous.

Through the fear, I manage to feel idiotic for my earlier petulance about her immortality. Of course there’s a reason the Bragi are build the way they are. I want to crawl back into the garbage and die when she looks at me as she lands on her feet beside me. “Now we really need to run.” Pulling me up, she leads us down the open alleyway and emerge on an abandoned street. Well, abandoned of all living things. Only a few scattered bodies litter the street, some torn to pieces.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Shut up and run.”

A howl reverberates off the buildings tightly packed together on the old cobblestone street. It is drawn out and moves closer with each second it lasts. Another creature picks up the call and answers back, closer than the first. Both are converging on…us.

I pick up my feet and try to run, but I’m too slow. I’ve never been much of a runner, but I’m pathetic next to her. She is two blocks ahead of me before she realizes how far behind I am. Backtracking, she comes and looks at me bent over, hands on my knees. She scans the area around us as the ground starts to shake. The creatures are coming. A few feet away, she lifts a sewer grate. “Get in,” she says, shoving me down the dark hole.

She follows and closes the cover just as the shaking stops. A silence ensues. Then I hear puffs of air. The monsters are up there, sniffing, smelling for us. The Bragi woman stands so still on the ladder rungs that she looks like a statue. I will myself not to move. I try to continue sucking wind as silently as I can. The streets above us bounce with the footsteps of the departing creatures. She lets out a breath, more of relief than of actual fatigue or fear.

Then she looks at me. I feel even smaller than before. Jumping down the ladder, she lands next to me and waits. I guess I should say something, even though anything that comes out of my mouth will prove I’m just as petty as she accused me of being. “What are those?” I decide to say.

“Watakseys.”

Silence.

I try again. “Why haven’t I ever seen them before?”

Ripping the hem of her shirt, she starts cleaning the stinking blood from her knives. “They’re only freed from the darkness of the forests when someone, Bragi or human, summons them by reading out of that.” She thrusts her chin toward the book I’d stuffed in my backpack earlier. Actually, she showed up as I was trying to sound out the rest of that page.

Yep. I’m an idiot. She stops the meticulous slide along the knife edge and holds out her hand. There’s no reason for me to pretend like I can keep it from her. As I set it in her palm, I see her face change. The stone set warrior look now shows something like remorse or regret or pain…

“I have spent my entire mature life trying to destroy this thing.” She weighs it in her hand. And laughs humorlessly. “It can’t be destroyed.”

When I found it hidden in a hollow of the tree I’d been perched in while waiting for the boars to wander away, I felt something come from it. A power or a presence. Did that stop me from trying to learn what the symbols meant or from reading out loud from it when I’d learned? No. Because I’m stupid. I was Indiana Jones and I’d come across the Holy Grail. The only thing others see when they look at me is a misshapen, tiny girl who will never blossom into womanhood. That book was my chance to prove I’m worth more than what people see.

“I thought I hid it well.”

While I’d been berating myself, she’d turned her gaze to me. “You weren’t the threat I was hiding it from. That’s why I hid it in your world.”

My world? I guess that makes sense since Bragi are nothing more than stories. Yet, here I am, talking to one. Maybe I should tug on her pointed ear, just to make sure she is what she says she is. I see her free hand clench into a fist. Can she read my thoughts? Best to stay away from her ears. It’s all I can do not to break into hysterical nervous, terrified giggling. I replay the way she jumped up the walls of that apartment complex, reaching the roof in two leaps. I see her swords gleaming with that Watakseys blood as she glides to the ground again. No, there’s no doubt she’s Bragi or at least something not found in my world. “Who were you hiding it from?”

“ There are some in my world who think that summoning the creatures these words do would allow us to fully eradicate the…No one wanders in those woods anymore. What were you, of all people, doing there?”

“How do you and your kind get into this world?”

“How old are you?”

I stop questioning her. It’s not like we were actually answering each other anyway. I hate when people ask my age. They ask when I’m at the store by myself buying groceries. Whenever I get on the bus, someone asks where my parents are. I’d already been humiliated by my mouth. No reason to be humiliated by this Bragi woman too.