Sorcerer's Luck Read online

  “Sure. Why not?”

  He showed me a large airy room, painted teal with white trim, with a big west-facing window and brocade drapes over lace sheers. When I pulled the curtains open, I saw the Bay, the Bay Bridge, and San Francisco glittering on the horizon. The single bed had an oak headboard carved with a pattern of flowers and vines. The tall dresser matched it. In one corner sat a little writing desk and a comfortable-looking upholstered green armchair. Just across the hall was a bathroom with a black marble tub as well as a shiny-clean shower stall.

  Don’t get me wrong. The luxury didn’t change my mind. His hope did. He was watching me with wide eyes but a slack smile, a wary look that made me think of feral cats. My mom would put out food for them, and they’d watch her from a distance, wanting it, wondering if they dared take it. If he truly were a bjarki, a feral animal was exactly what he was.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “I’ve got to go home right now and get some sleep. I’m wiped out. But I’ll try that part-time job.”

  He stared open-mouthed. “You must be desperate,” he said at last.

  “Yeah, I am. For all kinds of reasons.”

  Chapter 2

  Let me tell you something about vampires, real vampires like me, not those slimy thugs in the old horror movies or the sparkly, sexy kind in the new movies, either. We are not undead, for starters. We aren’t going to hang around crumbling for thousands of years. If anything, we have shorter lives than most people, just because it’s so hard to maintain our life force habit. It’s not blood we crave. It’s life force, chi, élan vital, whatever name you want to give it. Blood carries more of it than other kinds of tissue, so we’re always tempted to shed blood and then suck up the life force as it flows.

  Some of us turn to the bad and drain anyone they can get their hands on. That’s where the legends started, I guess, back in the Middle Ages in Europe, where the genetic mutation first appeared. Desperate sufferers of our weird disease probably did stalk victims at night, but not because they’d die from the touch of sunlight. When they met a defenseless person, they would have grabbed them and harvested all of the victim’s life force right there and then. Do things like that in broad daylight, where you can be seen and identified, and you end up with a stake through your heart.

  It’s possible, however, to skim just a little bit of someone else’s life, a drop here, a teaspoon there. They’ll never miss it, because a healthy person can regenerate their chi, their vital energies, just so long as you don’t take more than that smidgen at one time. You don’t have to cut them. You just touch them. I needed crowds, like at the county fair, for just that reason. Bump into someone, smile, apologize, and move on. They never knew, and I was one day farther away from dying young.

  I was still robbing them. I knew I was a thief. My father had told me that stealing a little bit here and there would hurt no one, but I didn’t know if it was true, not in any absolute sense of knowing something. All I had was his word for it. I would have stopped, really I would have, but oh god, I didn’t want to die, not when I was just barely twenty-two years old! But I did try to take as little as possible. The temptation, always, was to keep on taking, to swill up someone else’s life like a drunk swills cheap booze, to drink and wallow and suck until the victim dropped dead at your feet. I had never done it, never licked up more than that drop or smidgen. When my father told me about our family disease, I swore that I never would.

  So I knew how Tor felt on those crucial three nights a month, the longing and the temptation to break out of his flat and allow himself to run like the animal he believed himself to be. That’s why I took the job.

  “Can you be here Friday?” Tor said. “I never even asked when your classes are.”

  “It’s just summer school, and I’m only taking the one class, the portrait studio. I had to work as many days as possible this term just to keep my head above water.”

  “You were that desperate?”

  “Fraid so. The last three years have absolutely killed my savings and my credit. My cards are maxed out.”

  We agreed that I’d come back to his place the next Friday afternoon, the day that the moon would enter the dark part of its cycle. Tor wrote down his actual address and phone number on the back of a business card and gave me some directions, too, since we’d gotten there in an unorthodox way. He took me back to my place as promised without the slightest hint of trouble or hassle. At my door we politely shook hands.

  “It’s so good to see you again,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”

  I put his odd way of speaking down to English being his second language. With a little wave he turned and walked off. At the corner he vanished. I went inside and locked, bolted, and chained the door after me. After seeing Tor’s gorgeous flat, my own squalor hit me hard. The smell of mildew and damp seemed suddenly stronger. I prowled around, but I found no evidence of a new leak in the ceiling, only the gray stains on the sheet rock from the old ones. The people upstairs threw a lot of water around. I don’t know why. Maybe their sinks leaked, and the damned landlord was too cheap to fix them. I reminded myself that at least I could afford to pay the rent increase now, and that I wasn’t going to find a better place for the same money.

  Normally I worked at the burger joint from three p.m. to ten in the evening, three days a week in the middle of the week. Thursday night I was just on my way out of the door when my brother walked in, my older brother, just turned twenty-six that month. On his good days Roman was a handsome guy, tall, nicely built, with a thick mop of black hair that he wore cut just above the collar. He had deep-set dark eyes, regular features, and skin like mine, a deep olive or light tan—you could call it either way. That night, however, he was unshaven, he smelled really bad, and his eyes kept flicking this way and that, focusing anywhere but on me or the night manager.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You want money.”

  “I could use some, yeah.” His voice trembled so hard that I knew what he wanted to spend it on. “I haven’t eaten—”

  “Don’t lie to me!”

  I hooked my arm through his and walked him out of the burger joint. In silence we hurried down to my car, which I’d parked under a streetlight. The neighborhood around the burger joint called for caution. He shook his arm free of mine and leaned against the hood of the car.

  “I’m not giving you money for drugs,” I said.

  He stared at the sidewalk.

  “When do you get your next disability check?” I went on.

  “Soon.” He kept looking at the cracks in the cement. “It won’t be much. They’ve stopped letting me have all of it.”

  “Good. They pay out of it for that hotel room, huh?”

  “Yeah.” He looked up. “Maya, I really am hungry.”

  “So am I. Go to Saint Anthony’s in the morning.”

  “How am I going to get back to the city? Give me a ride?”

  “No.” I sighed, I debated, but in the end, I reached into my pocket and brought out my last five dollar bill. “Will you promise me you’ll spend this on BART and not on drugs?”

  “You can’t buy enough for five bucks to do any good.”

  Which is why I handed it over. I also gave him a ride to the nearest BART station and watched while he bought a ticket from one of the machines. My brother, my lucky brother who’d never developed the family disease, the star athlete, always lucky until he’d joined the Marines and served in the Iraq War. I had no idea what he’d seen or done there. He never talked about it. He just took every drug he could get his hands on.

  Friday after class, I went home to pack a few things to take to my new job. I did wonder if I ever should have agreed to it. I was going to spend the weekend alone with a guy who might be crazy but who definitely could work sorcery. If I hadn’t known my father and seen him study and work—or try to work—magic, I would never have gone back to Tor’s flat. But I had, and I’ll admit it, not only did I really need the money, I was curious as all hell.

  W
hen I arrived, Tor had a present for me: a calendar that displayed the lunar phases.

  “You’ll need this,” he told me, “if you decide to keep working here. Uh, look. Let’s consider this weekend a kind of job try-out. For your sake, I mean. If you really hate the stuff that happens, I’ll understand. You can quit. I’ll pay you for the days you work anyway.”

  “That’s really generous of you. Okay. Let’s see what happens.”

  I figured that nothing was going to happen, actually, except maybe he’d see things that weren’t there and I could reassure him.

  “You could put your stuff away,” he said. “I’ll cook dinner. Do you like fish? Sea bass.”

  “That would be wonderful, thanks!”

  I’d brought some clean clothes on a hanger and my laptop in my backpack. I also had a couple of sketchbooks and some Conté sticks for drawing the illusions if they really did happen to appear. I carried the stuff down the hall to the room that would be mine on work nights. I set everything onto the bed and opened the brocade drapes.

  In the golden glow of late afternoon the room looked positively medieval. Well, not real medieval. Burne-Jones medieval. I would have loved it as a child, and I liked it even as a grown-up. It had a real coffered ceiling in dark oak. Soft, thick area rugs in cheerful reds and yellows lay on the hardwood floor. In one corner stood a real Tiffany floor lamp. The oak furniture also struck me as genuinely antique, not that I’m an expert in that field. I examined the carvings on the dresser—a pattern of vines and wild roses right off a William Morris wallpaper. The pattern on the bedstead matched.

  Or at least, when I’d first seen the pieces, I could have sworn that the carvings matched. In the center of the headboard, however, I found an anthropomorphic moon-face carved in profile. I took a sketchbook and stick of sepia Conté from my backpack and drew the motif. The skinny moon-face looked exactly the same in my drawing as on the headboard—not an illusion, then. I decided that I simply hadn’t noticed it when Tor was showing me the room.

  The writing desk was another matter. Under its gazillion coats of black lacquer it might have been an antique in the Chippendale mode, but someone had first lacquered it, then used it as a background for the strangest decoupage I’d ever seen.

  The artist had meticulously cut all the images out of old-fashioned wood block prints, then colored them by hand in vivid hues. In the center stood a bright green lion eating a sun. The sun was bleeding all over the lion’s mouth. Around the lion motif was a circle of flying shrimp—pink shrimp like you’d find in salad, but with little wings. Fat green caterpillars crawled around the outer edge, nose to tail, to form a border. The artist must have made photocopies of an original, I figured, to get the multiple images.

  I opened the lid and found, on its underside, a zodiac with a spiky gold sun at the center, surrounded by small yellow fish laid nose to tail. Pale pink scallop shells formed the outer border. In one corner, tiny white script read “Liv Thorlaksdottir,” the artist, I assumed, and I could guess that she was one of Tor’s relatives from her name. She must have spent hundreds of hours on the piece, so many that I could ignore how ugly it was. Not all women’s craft-art has to be beautiful, you know. Maybe the long painstaking project had kept her sane during sunless winters in Iceland. The desk was empty. I shut the lid. I’d been thinking of putting my laptop on it, but I was afraid of marring the varnished surface

  I decided that I needed to make a show of earning my money, whether or not the alleged illusions showed up. I took the sketchbooks and Conté with me when I left the bedroom and put them on the coffee table in the living room. I found Tor in the kitchen, a sunny room with a real slate floor, green appliances, and a big wooden butcher’s block in the middle, where he was slicing tomatoes for salad. A breakfast bar separated the kitchen from the living room. I offered to help cook. When he shook his head no, I sat down on a high stool at the bar.

  “I like cooking,” Tor said. “Mundane stuff like this keeps me from drifting off somewhere. That’s one of the hazards, y’know, of being a sorcerer. Drifting off.”

  “Guess it would be.”

  He gave me a vague nerdy smile. We chatted about this and that—was the room comfortable, when I did have to leave for class on Monday, that kind of thing. I also asked him about the writing desk.

  “My sister made it for me. It’s strange, isn’t it? But then, so’s she.”

  “Ah” was the only reply I could come up with. If he considered her strange—oh man! I thought. She must really be something.

  “Is she older or younger than you?” I said.

  “Three years younger.” He paused, considering. “Almost to the day.”

  “Does she live around here?”

  “No. She married a man from Iceland and went back there with him. I visited them last year at Christmas. I don’t see how anyone stands the winters. I’ve been in California too long, I guess, to want to deal with the cold and the dark. Especially the dark.”

  “I’ve always wondered that myself.”

  “I couldn’t stay long, anyway. I had to cram the visit in between full moons.”

  Up until that point our conversation had been so ordinary that I’d forgotten he claimed to be a shape-changer. I began to wonder if Tor did indeed suffer from delusions on that point. Yet my own strange disease reminded me that sometimes folklore exists for a reason.

  My phone rang. I took it out of my shirt pocket and looked at the caller ID: Roman. I let it play—I’d downloaded a stride piano vamp for a ringtone—until the answering service took over.

  “Who was that?” Tor said.

  I saw no reason not to tell him. “My brother.”

  “You could have picked up. I wouldn’t have minded or anything.”

  “Thanks, but you don’t understand about my brother.”

  He tilted his head to one side and waited, his lips slightly parted, so bear-like a gesture that I was expecting him to grunt at me like the bears did in the TV documentaries. I considered, but he really did have the right to know about Roman.

  “Look,” I continued, “I don’t want him to know the address here. He’s a druggie. They steal. They can’t even help it, I know, but I don’t want him near your place, so I didn’t want him asking me where I was.”

  “Okay. I appreciate knowing that.”

  “All this family talk reminds me of something. Do you have an older relative who lives around here? Your father, maybe?”

  “No. My father’s dead.”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.” He shrugged. “He had adult-onset leukemia. They can cure it in kids, but he waited too long to see a doctor.”

  “That’s really too bad. I’ve heard that there isn’t much they can do for adults anyway.”

  “That’s what he tried to tell me.” Tor smiled, if you could call that faint, bitter twitch of his lips a smile. “They did a bone marrow transplant. My sister was a perfect match. It helped for a while, but.”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. I nodded to show I’d understood.

  “He died just about two years ago,” Tor went on. “It’s weird, but when I was bitten by the varg, the werewolf—I told you about that, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you sure did.”

  “Okay. It was on the anniversary of Dad’s death. I went hiking just because I wanted silence, and the woods around me. It was a comfort, because I kept remembering how he looked those last couple of weeks before he died. Skin and bones. Drugged.”

  His eyes filled with tears. He wiped them off on his sleeve.

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “That’s really sad. You two must have been really close.”

  “Yeah. He homeschooled me until I went to college.” He took a deep breath to steady his voice before he continued. “But as far as I know, anyway, the rest of my family’s all back in Iceland. My mother lives with my sister and her family on the family property.”

  “I wondered because I saw someone who looked like you
the other day, except he was like in his fifties. And he had blue eyes.” I tried to call up the memory, but the image I had was oddly fuzzy and vague—odd, that is, because I was taking a class on how to form precise images of a person.

  “Huh. I do have a couple of cousins who might have come to California, but they’re not that old.” Tor frowned, thinking. “I’ll email my sister. She might know, but it’ll take her a while to answer. They live in the middle of nowhere. No cell phone, nothing. A couple of times a week she goes into town to shop and pick up her mail, and when she has the time, she drops by an Internet cafe that has a broadband connection.”

  “Good grief!” I said. “They’re really isolated, then.”

  “Yeah. It’s probably just as well.”

  I waited for him to explain. Instead he gave me a vague smile and asked if I minded him putting capers in the salad. I took the hint and changed the subject.

  “If you’re doing the cooking,” I said, “why don’t you let me clean up afterwards? I mean, you’re paying me enough to be here. I could do something.”

  “Okay, if you want to do the dishes.” He pointed with the knife blade. “There’s the dishwasher, and there’s the switch for the garbage disposal. The soap’s under the sink.”

  That evening the moon went officially dark, and I learned why Tor had decided to hire an anti-illusionist. After dinner I was loading the dishwasher, and Tor was in the living room, when I heard him swear and call my name. I grabbed a dish towel and wiped my hands as I hurried around the breakfast bar to join him.

  Tor was sitting on the leather couch, an open book beside him, and pointing to a large parchment scroll that seemed to be hanging just above the coffee table. Aside from the way it floated in mid-air, I could have sworn it was a real, solid piece of ancient parchment, yellowing and splitting along the edges. Lines of scribbles vaguely like cursive writing marched down the center. I stared open-mouthed. Oh my god, I thought, he’s not crazy after all! Unless I am, too.