Freyja’s Daughters by: Elsbeth Henry must face the evil that lives in-between

Chapter 1

“What will history say about us that we willing sent our daughters to face the unspeakable? That we expected these brave young women these Valkyries to place themselves in harm’s way while we as a nation hid like rabbits. “

Colonel Lawrence S. Rutherford 2nd Battalion 33rd Marines

--0--

“Wow, she’s hot.” I overheard one boy’s in my class call out.

“Look at this one, the redhead.” Another one chimed in.

“What about the one in green.” Then a third decided to join the conversation.

“People, don’t you have better things to do? Or better yet, do this somewhere else,” I murmured.

“You mean the one with the nice rack?” And of course, Melvin had to get his two cents in idiot.

Calculus homework difficult at best of times was almost impossible while trying to ignore idiotic classmates drooling over some magazine. Most likely, not the type that would get you expelled, but with these morons, you could never be sure.

“What are you looking at, Melvin?” Amusing as it wasn’t, not sure why I butted in.

Melvin Archibald Jackson looked up and gave me a fuck you look; yea, he hated his name. With a shrug, I turned back to the beautiful world of indefinite integrals.

“Do you think Squire knows any of them?” The first voice spoke again. Ahh, that was Jacob, our class sycophant.

“Why in the hell would he know?” Melvin growled.

I now regretted my previous actions, “Please don’t get me involved.”

Praying to whatever gods were listening for Miss Thomason to return from the office to stop this nonsense failed miserably as he then shoved the magazine in my face.

With my dreams of a no calculus night now thoroughly crushed, I looked down at what appeared to be an old ‘Freyja's Daughters’ magazine.

The uplifting stories found inside were part of a broader PR campaign; however, the quarterly publication profits did go to a good cause. The Incursions, although infrequent as opposed to a decade ago, still took thousands of lives and caused a massive amount of damage. Most of the money earned went towards rebuilding those devastated communities.

“So Squire, your mother works for the DPA?” He asked, knowing full well where she worked.

“In Research and Development Melvin,” I made sure to give him a cheerful smile.

“Sweet, think you can set me up on a date?” One of the other guys pushed his friends out of the way to talk to me.

The Valkyries, the boys were drooling over, stood defiantly on the cover. One dressed in green and gold held a long spear at the ready, the second a petite older girl wore all white and wielded two curved swords.

Inside the magazine were more photos and a short article about some of the girls stationed east of the Mississippi. In spite of how my classmates behaved, none of the images were risqué as most of the Valkyries were underage.

Beyond the legal ramifications of taking such pictures, no one wanted to mess with The Department of Portal Administration (DPA). Besides, the senior Valkyries would happily track down the perpetrators and make their life a living hell.

“Alan, you said you liked the girl in green, right?” With a sigh, I flipped through the magazine so many memories and a lot of them unpleasant.

“Yea, that Mary is hot as hell,” he added.

Melvin grinned, “I’d do her too.”

I tried not looking at the girls on the other side of the room. By their unpleasant stares, most of them seemed less than amused by the comments so far. However, about half of came over to listen.

With a frown, I opened the magazine to Mary’s article. Like most, it contained photos with her family and several of her playing the piano.

“Sorry, but unless you’re into necrophilia, it’s not going to happen,” I said, running my fingers over a beautiful photo of Mary smiling with her little sister by her side.

“You mean she’s?” Alan looked a bit ill. Not surprisingly, she couldn’t have been more than a year older than most of the girls in our class.

“Mary McDonald loved music. I heard she started to play the piano before she turned six. She and Helen Clearwater, the one in white, were celebrating her acceptance into the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Unfortunately, the opening of a Class-4 portal less than a mile away interrupted the celebration. Bad luck, really.”

I could still remember that day. My cousin was devastated by the news. We knew them pretty well.

Flipping a couple of pages, I found Helen’s article. “Since they were on vacation, neither had their weapons.”

Thankfully no Valkyrie would end up in another situation without being adequately armed. I blame the PR folks, and many others do as well for their deaths.

“Still even without them, the two managed to hold off the Wraiths until most of the civilians in the area managed to reach a shelter.”

Flipping to the next page revealed the photo of a redhead with a mischievous grin. “Oh, this is a nice picture. Aideen hated taking photographs always thought her freckles were ugly.”

I loved her laugh.

“Was she killed too?” Melvin whispered, taking a seat.

I just nodded. “Three weeks ago, surprised you didn’t see it in the news.”

Then again, such things weren’t always reported anymore. No one wanted to hear that a fifteen-year-old girl was mauled to death — no need to upset the good people at breakfast, right?

The whole class became deathly still as I continued revealing little bits of information about the girls I knew. A bit different than the usual propaganda, the DPA loved to peddle to everyone. I could see they were happy that at least I had stopped speaking about the Valkyries in the past tense until the end.

The last article contained someone I knew quite well. I almost couldn’t continue but forced myself anyway, “And this article was written about my cousin Maggie before she died. Any more fucking questions?”

--0--

By the end of the century, the search for a new way to feed the hungry maw of the world's energy needs had almost become a quest for the Holy Grail. Countries and corporations spent trillions to discover an alternate fuel source. Finally, in Western Europe, the leader of a British-Swedish Think Tank, Alfonso Eklund, made a breakthrough in superstring theory.

At least ten dimensions were well known to scientists of the 20th century. Others were thought to be known, but Eklund believed that he could somehow draw power from the free energy in-between.

‘Energy from in-between will power our world’ had become the slogan. Mathematicians and physicists around the world thought, for the most part, the theory sound, so the mad scramble to develop a working device began. A decade later, a small experimental collector confirmed his theory.

Several years later, Eklund and his team built a larger collector, with full support and backing from several countries, and created a dimensional rift about the size of a beach ball.

A great cheer went up when the portal opened, then surprise when it could not be closed and finally screams of terror when shadowy creatures began to crawl out of the opening. These monsters between worlds took on the appearance of humanity’s ancient nightmares.

No one in the control room survived the initial onslaught until the monsters came across eighteen-year-old Private First Class Carmen Zayas, who stood guard outside the building.

When the portal opened, a wave of energy swept over the facility in all directions. Upon touching Carmen, something in her changed. Her short hair lengthened. Purple plate armor adorned her head arms and legs. Her uniform transformed as well, manifesting as armored leggings while her flack jacket became a golden breastplate.

When the first wolf-like beast burst through the doors, Carmen fired her rifle with seemingly no effect. Then with a battle cry, she charged swinging the gun like a great club. The first beast burst into dust. Her next swing took out another. The third, a much larger wolf monster, disarmed her, but the new Valkyrie pulled out her knife and fought on.

Thankfully, the first Incursion lasted less than ten minutes. With the portal’s collapse, the creatures vanished, and Carmen unmanifested, leaving a very confused and seriously wounded Private.

No one outside the governments knew what had occurred until fifteen days later when a second rift suddenly open in the center of Manchester, England quickly enveloping a quarter of downtown.

--0--

“Sally, I’m back.” Moving through the house, I dropped a bag of snacks on the living room table before heading upstairs. I still had my calculus homework to do.

“Welcome home, Henry.” An older woman’s voice greeted me from the kitchen, “Your mother just called. Unfortunately, she’s unable to leave work but promised to be home for your birthday on Saturday.”

“Whatever.” Nothing new really, I hadn’t seen my mom in about two weeks. With a quick toss, my backpack ended on my bed before I opened the door across from my bedroom.

“Hey, Mags,” I whispered.

“I see you’ve been to the convenience store.” Sally’s voice came from the hallway.

Opening the closet in the rear of the bedroom, I called out, “It’s just some snacks and a couple of bottles of pop!”

“Your mother would not approve.”

I thought I heard her coming up the stairs. Nice woman as much as I complain I do appreciate having someone at home after school.

“My mother isn’t here to tell me otherwise,” I whispered before shouting down the hallway once more. “It won’t spoil my dinner! It’s for this evening. I have some calculus work to do and might as well work on my presentation for the physics lab review!”

Closing the bedroom door, I began to search the closet’s hangers. I had a couple of favorite outfits, but most of them didn’t fit anymore. Not that such a minor thing would keep me from completing my quest. Maggie had a lot of clothes.

Happily, I discovered a lovely blue skirt and white blouse before opening her dresser to remove a bra and pantie set. Breast forms added, makeup done, and in no time at all, I looked like a mini-Maggie.

According to my therapist, everyone handles grief differently. My mother disappeared into her work. I traveled down a different path.

My cousin and I had been inseparable. She was my sister, all but in name. And although I knew she wouldn’t be happy with my inability to move on, secretly, I think she would approve of the outfit. In fact, she would be pleased that someone got some use out of her old clothes.

My dressing up? Well, she started it, after all.
.
When most of Montréal vanished off the map, Maggie had thankfully been away at summer camp. Several days later, authorities contacted my mother about her sister and brother-in-law's deaths. A shell-shocked nine-year-old girl appeared on our doorstep another week later.

It took time, but eventually, she crawled out of that shell into the crazy girl I had come to love. One of my fondest memories was the first time she got me into girl’s clothes, and it’s probably different from what you think.

As an obnoxious little brat, I remember jumping on her bed every day after I came home from school. On that fateful day, she couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.

“Mags, you said you would play with me.”

“What did you say, Henry?” She replied absentmindedly.

As all preteen girls know ignoring younger siblings was a sacred tradition, especially ignoring one nine-year-old boy, specifically me.

“Play With Me,” I gave her a flat look.

I was ready to mercifully annoy my dear old cousin, since I too believed in the strict adherence in following all traditions, but the magazine in her hand stopped me cold.

“Awesome Valkyries,” I slipped between her arms to take a better look.

She had come home from school with one of those celebrity gossip magazines. Although it carried photos of some movie star or another, the young women on the front cover caught my attention.

Soon we started flipping the pages together before she pointed to a photo of a dozen young girls standing in front of an army base, much like a school photo. According to the article, half of the group had recently manifested.

“I don’t think I know any of them. Do you?” She looked down at me. As a frequent visitor to Fort Roosevelt, my mom made sure to introduce us to any Valkyrie that happened to be on base.

Pointing to the tall blonde woman in the back, I replied. “Other than Doctor Swenson, no.”

Doctor Swenson was one of my mom’s friends and a former Valkyrie like her.

“Too old right,” Maggie commented while turning to the next page.

It showed the senior girls holding their various weapons. I heard later that one of the photographers wanted to get them into swimsuits. The DPA shot that down pretty quick, not that I cared at the time.

“Yea, she’s almost thirty or something.”

The power or whatever it was, which allowed them to manifest, disappeared when the girls reached around the age of twenty-five.

“That’s pretty old,” Mags giggled. “Still, it would be exciting to be one.”

“Sure they get to fight monsters and have neat looking outfits and weapons,” I nodded in total agreement. Most of the girls I knew ran around recess pretending to be famous Valkyries.

“Well, you said you wanted to play,” Mags gave me this knowing grin, which I knew from experience I might come to regret what she was going to suggest next. “How about we play Valkyries, but you have to dress like one.”

Of course, any twelve-year girl expected her male cousin to hotly refuse a game of dress-up. However, she didn’t quite understand my growing obsession. Instead, I tried to think of a reason why not to. It’s not like anyone would see me.

“Ok.” I jumped up, looking around.

“What?” She blurted out in surprise.

“As long as I get to be Black Rain!” I yelled, running out of the room to return moments later with a signed photo.

It can still be found on my wall today, the two girls, one in blue, the other black and me in the middle with a happy grin on my face. Meeting the famous Black Rain had been one of the high points of my young life, especially when she allowed me to hold her spear. I always wanted one after that.

“You can be the one in blue. I don’t remember her name, but she was super nice. We shared some snacks. ”

In no time at all, we were both dressed in something that resembled the Garderobes the two Valkyries in the photos wore if you squinted your eyes. Although, I thought they looked pretty good for what a nine and twelve-year-old could accomplish in such a short time.

“What?” Looking up from my work taking apart a broom, I failed to notice Maggie staring at me the whole time.

“Come over here.” She reached down to help me off the floor.

“But, I’m trying to build a spear.” I already knew that dismembering the broom might not be the best of ideas, but most nine-year-old boys don’t worry about consequences.

“We’ll work on that in a few minutes.” Dragging me out of the room, she made me stand in front of a full-length mirror at the end of the hallway.

“Alright, what am I looking at?” I replied with annoyance.

“Your reflection silly. Now, what do you see?” Maggie stood back, motioning me towards the mirror.

Reality shifted at that very moment. I could not believe the transformation. With my hair pulled back and a little makeup applied, I looked like a clone of my older cousin, a mini-Maggie.

“Is that me?” I exclaimed in horror, “Gross, I look like you.”

“Idiot,” grinning, she started to play with my hair. “You look like my little sister.”

Process that idea for a moment; I put it aside, deciding that building a weapon for the two of us was much more critical.

“I guess that’s not too bad then.”