The Boys Who Loved Me - Krista Wolf Page 0,84
slow motion. It landed face-down, throwing me back into virtual darkness as I scrambled to my knees to answer it.
“H—HELLO?”
“Hey beautiful.”
I was frightened, tingling, full of adrenaline. But also wholly confused. “Wait, w—what?”
“Surprised to hear from me?”
Recollection dawned over me slowly, but only in the form of an educated guess.
“Tristan?”
“No, not Tristan,” the voice said a little bitterly. “The other Viking. The only one that matters.”
“Lucas then?”
I was teasing him, because by now I could put a face to the voice. On the other side of the call, his frustration grew.
“No, it’s—”
“Soren,” I smirked, rising back to my feet. “So you’re the winner of my phone number? I sort of figured you would’ve called earlier.”
“I would’ve,” he admitted. “But it took us two days to fight it out. Tristan claimed to have memorized and swallowed part of his number, then tried to steal mine. And since Lucas had the first three digits, he sat down and started trying calling all possible combinations for the others.”
I shook my head clear. “That’s like ten-thousand different numbers, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, he’s an asshat,” laughed Soren. “Eventually we just put our heads together and decided on something we could all agree upon.”
“And what’s that?”
“Three dates,” he replied plainly. “We each take you out on a different night, and we let you decide.”
Shivering in the darkness, I wrapped the towel around me a little tighter.
“Any of you got electrical experience?” I asked abruptly. “You can have your date right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well I’m standing in front of my electrical panel dripping wet, wearing only a towel.”
“That doesn’t sound safe.”
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. Especially in the darkness.”
“Did you try the circuit breakers?”
“Yup,” I confirmed. “But this electrical panel just might be pre-Benjamin Franklin. It has these big glass screw fuses below the main box, and—”
“Is one of them scorched black?”
I nodded slowly. “Blacker than the Ichabod Crane’s heart.”
“Ichabod Crane was the good guy,” Soren pointed out.
“Oh. Haven’t seen the movie yet.”
“What’s the wattage on the scorched fuse?”
I shrugged as another shiver ran down my spine. I let out an exasperated sigh. “Fuck if I know.”
“That’s not a wattage,” Soren chuckled. “Look at the fuse itself. There should be a number.”
I did. Hope rose.
“It says ‘30’.”
“Alright,” Soren replied. “I can dig up one of those. Sit tight and send me your address.”
I punched it in, while carefully making my way upstairs. In the near pitch black, the house was spookier than ever — all dark shapes against semi-darkness. The vulnerability of being naked added to the fear factor. And being wet certainly didn’t help.
“Soren?” I asked, feeling around for the hallway.
“Yeah?”
“Please hurry.”
Six
TRISTAN
She answered the door in mismatched sweat-clothes and a pair of slippers, squinting against the roaming flashlight of Soren’s phone. There was a thick towel wrapped tightly around her head. It looked like a turban.
“You said she’d be in a towel,” Lucas groaned behind me.
“And dripping wet,” I added.
She rolled her eyes as she let us in. If the old cottage had looked spooky from the outside, inside it was full of shadows.
“Sorry for the crowd crashing our date,” Soren told her bitterly. “Lucas insisted on driving, and Tristan was the one with the toolbox of old fuses.”
“Thanks to my grandfather,” I confirmed, “who refused to throw anything out.”
That part was true, but the bigger truth was there was no way we were letting Soren go alone. Giving him the advantage of being there at night and in a rescue type of scenario could’ve edged Lucas and I out even before we got to go on our dates.
“Besides,” said Soren. “Vikings stick together. They travel in packs.”
“Hordes,” Lucas corrected him. “But yeah. He’s not exactly wrong.”
Our beer maid was even more beautiful out of her uniform. She was tall and pretty. Deeply tanned from the summer, with full kissable lips and almond-shaped eyes that held a keen intelligence behind their chocolate beauty.
“This way, boys.”
She lifted a slender arm and pointed to the open basement door. One by one we filed down, with her bringing up the rear. In retrospect it was a bad idea. The old staircase creaked loudly, protesting our combined weight.
“How do we know this isn’t just some elaborate plan to trap us all in your basement?” I called back.
“You really don’t,” she confirmed merrily. “I guess you’ll find out when you get to the bottom and the door slams shut.”
The basement was unnavigable without crouching at least a foot, that’s how low the ceilings were. On top of that it was dank