HARD BICEPS had pressed painfully against Chase’s neck as they struggled across the dunes. By the time Chase managed to get Bjorn across the sand to the hotel, he was feeling the strain of helping bear the man’s weight. Bjorn was several inches taller than Chase and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds—all of which was solid muscle, from the feel of Bjorn’s arm across Chase’s back.
Bjorn Eriksson. Bjorn the Traveler. Ri-ight. Maybe he was a member of some tragically nerdy Viking role-playing group, Chase thought as he struggled to remove his keycard from his pocket without collapsing under Bjorn’s weight. Cosplays, Chase recalled, short for “costume plays,” were skits in which the participants dressed in authentic costumes and assumed the personality of their characters.
That would explain a lot—like why Bjorn was dressed the way he was, why he affected an archaic speech pattern, and why he pretended not to be familiar with mundane things like hotels and cell phones. Perhaps one of his role-playing buddies had whacked him over the head with a prop sword a little too enthusiastically during their skit, and as a result, Bjorn’s mind had jumbled reality and fantasy.
Yup. That had to be the explanation.
After opening the door to the hotel’s lobby, Chase helped Bjorn down the carpeted hall toward his room. A maid gave them a curious double take as she trundled her cleaning cart down the hall, leaving a strong odor of pine disinfectant in her wake, but she was the only person they met. Which was fine with Chase. The last thing he wanted was to have to explain to hotel security why he was lugging a soaking wet, wild-looking man into his room, who had a large sword sheathed at his hip and claimed to have survived a shipwreck.
Happily, by the time they reached Chase’s room, Bjorn seemed to be feeling better. He shook off Chase’s help and walked the rest of the way unaided. Maybe a trip to the hospital wouldn’t be necessary after all. Unless it was of the psychiatric variety—the jury was still out on that subject.
“What magic is this?” Bjorn breathed, looking up at one of the domed lights that lit the hallway. He held his palm up to it, as if to feel its heat. “How does your fire burn with no heat or smoke? How does it burn upside down?”
“Alrighty, then. Let’s get you inside, shall we?” Chase muttered, ignoring the question. How hard would a man have to hit his head to forget what electric lights were?
He used his keycard again to open the door to the room. Holding it open, he ushered Bjorn inside and noticed Bjorn had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the lintel of the door.
Bjorn took two steps into the room and froze, seemingly transfixed by the décor.
“Odin’s toenails! What wealth have you that you sleep in such a bed? ’Tis fit for a king! Nei, a god!” Bjorn gushed. He walked to the bed and slid his hand over the comforter that covered the queen-size mattress.
“It’s a bed, Bjorn, and a hotel bed at that. Nothing fancy. You’re acting like you’ve never seen one before.” Chase laughed. Surely the man must be one doughnut short of a dozen or had a worse head injury than Chase originally thought. Who did a lumpy old bed and a generically ugly hotel comforter impress?
Evidently Bjorn, because he continued to ooh and ahh over it for the next five minutes, until he discovered the TV remote control. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he accidentally switched on the TV, cursing loudly in a language Chase didn’t recognize, his face frozen in a look of pure fright.
Things were getting progressively weirder by the minute. Who in the twenty-first century had never seen a television? Or if they hadn’t actually seen one, had never at least heard of one? No one Chase knew of, except perhaps for a few isolated tribes in remote places like the Amazon.
Bjorn, who stood at well over six feet and whose hair was the color of wheat, did not look as if he’d just stepped off a plane from the middle of the rainforest.
But not even Academy Award-winning actors were good enough to fake the kind of surprise etched on Bjorn’s face, which made Chase begin to doubt his role-player theory.
For the first time, Chase took a good, hard look at Bjorn’s clothing. His shirt didn’t seem tailored at all—just simple, loose-fitting pieces of rough homespun cut into shape and sewn together with thick laces. His wide leather belt had a simple brass buckle and was cinched tightly, accentuating his narrow waist and lean hips. Close-fitting trousers of the same simple brown homespun clung to his muscular thighs and calves. Footwear of soft leather, more moccasin than boot, were laced up to his knees and lined with fur of some kind.
Bjorn’s clothing was not exactly what you might pick up from the sale racks at Barneys New York. Shit, it wasn’t even what you’d pick up from the clearance aisle at Walmart.
Cosplay, Chase firmly told himself, pushing his newly birthed doubts aside. He’d heard some folks who were into that sort of thing spent thousands on recreating authentic costumes.
Bjorn had to have spent all of his money on costuming, because it was obvious to Chase he hadn’t spent a dime on personal grooming.
Bjorn’s hair was long and wild, uneven and matted. As it dried, it looked as if it had been trimmed with a machete. Chase seriously doubted Bjorn had ever seen the inside of a hair salon.
His hands were rough, the skin darkly tanned and his palms callused. That went with his fingernails, ragged and blackened under the edges with grime. A man didn’t get calluses like that unless he worked with his hands every day. Perhaps Bjorn was a fisherman when he wasn’t dressing up like a Viking.
Fisherman or not, that still didn’t explain his continual confusion over simple things like hotels and television sets. The more Chase thought about it, the more convinced he became that there was something odd about Bjorn. Something tickled at the edge of his mind, but Chase wouldn’t give it credence. Something so totally unbelievable that for Chase to even say it aloud would be tantamount to admitting he was losing his own grip on reality.
As he perused Bjorn’s appearance and manners—or lack thereof—his conviction that Bjorn was a member of a role-playing group rang less and less true. Bjorn’s confusion seemed real; his naïveté and unabashed astonishment at his surroundings seemed genuine.
“Bjorn?” he asked, shaking his head at his own folly but unable to resist asking. “What year is it?”
“Year? It is 975, by my last count. I do not keep close track of such things. One turn of the seasons is much like the one before and often like the one after, the only difference being the mark of the man who lived them,” Bjorn said distractedly, still holding the remote control. He seemed entranced by the way the images flickered on the screen. He crouched down in front of the set and tapped the glass with his fingers. “Have you many tiny men here? These in this box are even smaller than wood trolls.”
Chase gaped at Bjorn, although his incredulous look went unnoticed. “Bjorn, how did you get here?”
“What? I told you the tale on the beach. The Dragonslayer overturned in the rough seas. I think mayhap I angered the gods when I cursed their fickleness.”
“You cursed the gods?”
“Ja. Odin and Thor in particular. Although in truth I might have thrown a few others into the mix before they took offense. Tell me, Chase, what do you feed these small men?”
“They aren’t real, Bjorn.”
Bjorn laughed, and for a moment, Chase glimpsed a different man from the one who’d washed up on the beach, whose smile lit his face and made his pale blue eyes sparkle. “Oft times I was tempted to wish the same, Chase. But the gods are as real as you and I, and often just as temperamental.”
“No, I meant the little men. They aren’t real.”
“Do you not see them?”
“Of course I see them.”
“Then they are real,” Bjorn said, shrugging. He stood up, and stretched. “What have you for food in this keep?”
“Uh, I can order some pizza,” Chase said, reaching for the phone. Actually, he was grateful for the distraction from their very bewildering conversation and the growing suspicion he had that Bjorn might just be exactly who he claimed. “Hi. This is room 197. Let me have a couple of large pies, extra cheese, and two bottles of Bud. No, wait—make it four bottles. Thanks.”
“I cannot give you pie or cheese, Chase. I have none,” Bjorn said, frowning at him.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Then to whom where you speaking?”
“Room service.”
“Is this… room servant here with us now?” Bjorn asked, raising a brow. He went on without waiting for an answer. “Chase, you are a good man, but I fear you a little soft in the head. You say that these little men, whom I can see, are not real, and yet you speak to servants who I cannot see as if they exist.”
Chase blinked, staring openmouthed at Bjorn. The expression Bjorn wore was one of absolute seriousness. He wasn’t joking.
No, it couldn’t be. Bjorn couldn’t possibly be…. And yet, if Chase combined Bjorn’s archaic way of speaking, his odd clothing and personal appearance, and the fact he seemed to know absolutely nothing about the modern world, he could only come to one of two possible conclusions. Either Bjorn was completely out of his mind, as wiggy as Cher’s hair extensions, or he was a lot older than Chase had originally thought.
As much as Chase’s rational mind screamed that the former was the correct conclusion, his gut told him the latter was closer to the truth. Chase had always trusted his gut, and it rarely let him down.
“Bjorn,” he said, “I think you’d better have a seat. We need to talk.”
Bjorn sat down on the bed and was immediately distracted by the soft, springy mattress. He bounced with the delight of a child, grinning, until he finally gave into temptation and threw himself backward, spreading out full-length on top of the comforter. His bulk took up most of the queen-size bed.
Chase sat on the very edge of the bed and bit his lip. “Bjorn, somehow—and I have no idea how, so don’t ask—I think that you’ve managed to come forward about one thousand thirty-nine years into the future, and crossed an ocean at the same time.” Chase stood and began pacing, ignoring the dubious look on Bjorn’s handsome face. “Maybe you hit a wormhole, or maybe the electrical power of the storm did something funky to the atmosphere. Hell, maybe your gods did more than just sink your ship. Maybe they drop-kicked you forward in time. All I know is that you seem to be an honest-to-god Viking, and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with you now.”
“If this is the future, then ’tis a glorious one. You sleep on clouds!” Bjorn laughed and rolled back and forth across the bed.
“You’re missing the point, Thor,” Chase said with a sigh.
“Bjorn.”
“I know. I was being facetious.”
“You said your name was Chase,” Bjorn countered. “Why do you seek to be someone you are not?”
“Never mind.” Chase was saved from expanding on his answer by a knock at the door. He rose, opened it, and let the room steward in, pushing his service cart ahead of him. A delicious aroma wafted from the large, circular, covered dishes in the center of the table. Four frosty bottles of Budweiser sat chilling in ice next to it.
Out of the corner of his eye, Chase noticed Bjorn had jumped off the bed, one hand sliding his sword—the one Chase had assumed to be a prop—from its sheath. He stood just behind Chase, and from the look on the room steward’s face, Bjorn wasn’t smiling. Evidently Vikings were not big on strangers walking into their bedchambers.
Chase signed the check for the steward, added a generous tip, and ignored the frightened-rabbit look on the man’s face as he backed out of the door.
As soon as the door closed, Chase turned on Bjorn. “Okay, lesson number one in the Viking’s Manual for Modern Living: no scaring the shit out of the locals,” he said, frowning. “Put the sword away.”
Any argument Bjorn might have made was cut off when Chase lifted the lid off the first covered dish. Chase could see the impact the aromatic pizza had on him as Bjorn sniffed the air once, then zeroed in on the pie as if his nose were a heat-seeking missile.
Chase served Bjorn a couple slices on a standard-issue, white china hotel plate and cracked open a beer for him. Sitting on the bed, he watched Bjorn’s face color with ecstasy with his first bite.
“By Thor’s Hammer! Surely this must be Asgard! Only in the halls of the gods would such food be served!” Bjorn groaned, a string of gooey cheese caught on his lower lip, his cheeks smeared with tomato sauce.
Chase grinned and reached over to wipe Bjorn’s mouth. “Here. This is a napkin. We use it to wipe our mouths,” he said, holding out the large white square of linen.
Bjorn looked at it askance as he dragged his sleeve across his lips.
Suddenly Chase had the impression dealing with Bjorn was going to be a lot more challenging than he’d thought. He sighed and handed Bjorn his beer before taking a swig on his own.
Bjorn lifted the bottle, dwarfed in his large hand, to his nose and sniffed. Tilting it to his lips, he drained it in one long swallow and let out an even longer belch.
“Why don’t you scratch your nuts while you’re at it?” Chase murmured under his breath.
“They do not itch.”
“Forget I said anything.” Chase chuckled and shook his head. He’d do well to remember that Bjorn seemed to take everything he said at face value. “More pizza?”
Bjorn ate both pies and looked as if he could eat a dozen more. Chase made a mental note never to take him to an all-you-can-eat buffet—Bjorn would drive them into bankruptcy in one sitting. Chase had managed to snag a slice for himself before Bjorn wolfed down the rest, and Bjorn had watched him eat it as if he were ready to yank it out from between Chase’s teeth.
Another thing became obvious to Chase the longer the two of them sat in the hotel room, and that was, to put it politely, Bjorn stank like a landfill on a hot summer day.
He was going to need to introduce Bjorn to the modern marvels of running hot and cold water, soap, shampoo, and deodorant if Chase was going to spend any extended amount of time in his company. It was either that or invest in nose plugs.
Rising, Chase walked into the bathroom and started the shower. He lined up the necessary toiletries on the vanity, then took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Certainly Vikings didn’t abhor water—they were sailors, weren’t they? Still, this particular Viking had drowned, or nearly so, and might be a little skittish about getting wet again.
It didn’t matter. Somehow Chase needed to get Bjorn under the spray and scrub some of the stink off him before the maids began to think Chase had a dead body stuffed under the bed.
“Bjorn,” he said, stepping out of the bathroom. Bjorn was again glued to the television set, riveted by Spock and Captain Kirk as they fought the Klingons. “Bjorn?” He walked over and tapped Bjorn on the shoulder to get his attention.
“Ja?”
“Forgive me for being rude, but you reek.”
Bjorn looked at Chase as if he didn’t understand what Chase was talking about. “I am a man. I smell like one.”
“No. You’re a man, but you smell like a pig.”
The black look that colored Bjorn’s face made Chase worry he’d just committed a serious faux pas.
“I mean, you’re not a pig, I know that, but you smell… bad.” His tongue tripped over itself trying to make amends without backing down from the reason for bringing it up in the first place. Bjorn really, really needed a shower.
“I owe you a great debt, Chase, but I do not hold kindly with being insulted. Not by you, not by anyone!” Bjorn growled, standing. He loomed over Chase, who had to look up to meet his gaze.
“I’m not trying to insult you. Please, Bjorn. Just take a shower. Come on, you’ll like it! Really.”
“First you insult me, then ask me to steal something for you? Why do you not take this shower yourself? Has it teeth?”
“No, no, you don’t understand. I don’t need you to take anything… just let me show you, okay?” Chase sighed, giving up on trying to explain. It was something Bjorn would need to experience to understand. “It’s in here,” he said, pointing to the bathroom.
“I will seize this shower for you, but then we will speak of the respect due a warrior,” Bjorn growled.
Chase swung open the bathroom door to reveal a cloud of steam and a damp fog that slowly cleared as the cooler air of the bedroom flowed in. He noticed Bjorn drew his sword and hesitated only briefly before stalking inside, as if taking a moment to gather his strength and wits before charging into the unknown.
“You won’t need your sword, Bjorn. It’s just—oomph!” Chase walked in and subsequently slammed into the solid wall of Bjorn’s back as Bjorn ripped open the shower curtain, cursed, and backed up.