Grendel's Curse. Alex Archer

      He leaned in and tapped on the window, his signet ring rattling on the glass.

      Lars couldn’t move.

      He couldn’t even check if the car doors were locked.

      He was frozen in place by fear. There wasn’t a single muscle in his body that would obey him. It was all he could do to breathe.

      It was the pain that finally broke through to end his paralysis. He turned the key over again, shaking like a leaf. The tapping was more forceful the second time it came and he heard a muffled, “You don’t want to do that, Mr. Mortensen,” as he fumbled with the key again. “Open up.”

      Reluctantly, Lars opened the window a crack. It wasn’t exactly meeting the goon halfway, but he hoped it’d buy him a few seconds to think.

      “Leave the key alone, Mr. Mortensen,” the goon said, leaning in close to the cracked window. By repeating his name he was laying down a none-too-subtle hint that he knew exactly who Lars was and what he was doing. “I think it might be a good idea if you turned around and went back to the site, don’t you?”

      “Who are you?” Lars said. It came out more as a plea for knowledge than a demand.

      “It doesn’t really matter who I am, does it? All that matters is that you don’t do anything stupid. Stupidity can be very dangerous for your health, Mr. Mortensen.”

      The car started suddenly, catching Lars by surprise. His hands had been working at the key without him thinking about it.

      “Don’t,” the goon said. One word, filled with menace.

      That one word said it all.

      Lars threw the car back into gear and stamped the gas to the floor, sending his car lurching back.

      “You don’t want to do that,” the goon called out, still calm, still full of menace.

      That was when Lars realized the driver hadn’t been sitting by idly twiddling his thumbs—even as he tried to peel away from the makeshift roadblock the driver of the black car floored the gas, fishtailing around in a crazy hand-brake turn, and rammed him full-on.

      The impact threatened to drive Lars off the road.

      The engine grunted and died.

      The windshield shattered, showering Lars with fragments of glass.

      His hands moved frantically, but he couldn’t get the car moving again.

      “I asked you not to,” the goon said. There was a gun in the guy’s hand and it was pointing straight at Lars’s face. They were no more than three feet apart. There was no way he could miss. “I’m done asking.”

      6

      The café was nice enough, hand-painted forest scenes on one wall, a rather Rubenesque nude reclining on another. It took Annja a while to recognize the full-figured beauty was actually the woman behind the counter. She smiled as she ordered her latte, admiring anyone who could put themselves out there like that. There were other pictures and hand-painted signage promising forty blends of coffee and a vast array of unhealthy eating options. She refused to give in to temptation, no matter how good the pastries looked. It was too early for anything apart from toast.

      There were three other couples in the place, and one lone diner. Lars had not arrived yet.

      Some sort of soft jazz hummed in the background, perfectly in keeping with the boho-chic furniture.

      Annja checked her watch. Not much time had passed since Lars’s call. She took a seat by the window to wait.

      And wait.

      She didn’t know any of the tunes, and couldn’t read the newspaper on the counter, so all she could do was people watch as customers came and went, ordering their nonfat skinny lattes and caramel mochaccinos to go.

      She could have stayed in bed for another hour, she realized, polishing off the ice-cold dregs in her cup. She wasn’t impatient, but it didn’t take that long to get from the dig site to town. Forty minutes tops. And he’d already been on the road. Of course she was assuming he’d been at the site when she’d called him. It had been ninety now, if the clock on the wall was anything to go by.

      She decided on a refill and a cake, and promised herself she’d give Lars another half hour, and then she was off to the site to see what what was going on.

      Annja finally decided she should call him, just to be sure she hadn’t gone to the wrong café. The city was full of them, after all. Though surely he would have called her....

      She punched in his number.

      “What is this, treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen, Lars? I’m here. Where are you? Call me, okay?” she told his voice mail. “I’m on my second cup of coffee and I’m about to gorge myself on cake. This isn’t good. There’s only so much temptation I can resist. If I put on twenty pounds, you’ll pay—just remember that.”

      She hung up and put the phone on the table in front of her.

      “Boyfriend trouble?” the owner asked, offering a sympathetic smile.

      “Nothing that a slice of carrot cake won’t fix,” she said.

      “That’s lucky, then, considering,” the owner said, putting a hefty slice of carrot cake on the table in front of her.

      Annja jammed her fork into the middle of the carrot cake and pulled it apart.

      “That’s the spirit,” the woman said, and left her to it.

      Annja smiled. If it had been a date she’d have been out of there an hour ago. Work was different. So she waited, concentrating on the carrot cake, which had just the right amount of sweet to take her mind off being stood up.

      The pleasure was interrupted when her phone began to vibrate against the tabletop. The screen lit up with Lars’s number in the middle of the display.

      Annja picked it up and, without missing a beat, said, “You get lost?”

      There was a long silence before a slightly accented male voice spoke. “Who is this, please?”

      Annja gave her name without thinking. “Who is this?”

      “This is the police, Miss Creed. Are you a friend of Mr. Mortensen’s?”

      “Not really,” she said. “I’m doing a segment about the dig that Lars...Mr. Mortensen is working on.”

      “Dig?”

      “Yes, the archaeological dig at Skalunda. You might have seen it on the news last night? Karl Thorssen broke the ground? I was due to meet Lars this morning.”

      “Where are you at the moment?”

      “I’m in a coffee shop in Gothenburg, down by the station. Why?” She struggled to remember what it was called, then spotted the name of the place on top of the printed menu that stood upright in front of her. She had been staring at it for the past half an hour but it had not registered.

      “Café Skalunda,” she said. Even when she had been making her way there she had not realized that it bore the same name as the barrow. She smiled despite herself. She really was in a world of her own.

      And then alarm bells started to ring inside her head. Why did the police want to know where she was? She was about to ask the officer why he was ringing her on Lars’s phone when he hung up.

      She stared at the phone, trying to understand what had just happened.

      Was someone pranking her?

      Had something happened to Lars?

      She redialed the number. It went straight to voice mail.

      That made even less sense, unless the caller was going through his call log to reach out to people, but why would he do that?

      As