Sorcerer's Feud Read online

  While I waited for him to come back up, I tried to draw the bear spirit. I could sketch Tor easily, standing with his arms raised. I drew in a portion of the rune circle with no trouble, too. Yet when I tried to focus my mind on the spirit, the image disappeared from my mind. I could envision other bears, ones I’d seen in zoos or TV documentaries, but that particular smoky figure refused to come clear. When I laid down my stick of pastel I did catch a mental glimpse, but as soon as I picked the pastel up again, the glimpse vanished. She didn’t want me to draw her, to capture her trace. I knew that as suddenly as if a voice had spoken to tell me. Whatever had happened that night happened between Tor and the bear spirit. I had no part in it.

  My jealousy flamed beyond my power to kill it.

  Tor came whistling up the stairs a few minutes later. When he walked into the living room, I said, “You sure sound happy about something.”

  He stopped and looked at me. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing. I was just wondering what the bear spirit said to you.”

  “She growled, that’s all. It felt like a challenge, but I’m not sure.” He shrugged the question away. “Do you want dinner now?”

  I wondered if he’d lied about the bear spirit, but I felt too foolish to ask him.

  “I can wait to eat,” I said. “You look tired. Uh, y’know, I’m sorry I snarled at you like that.”

  “Don’t be. It tells us something we need to know. I just don’t know what that is yet.” He paused and hooked his thumbs over the waistband of his jeans while he looked me over. “These events with ritual power behind them? They always mean something. They’re always important.”

  I refused to say anything.

  “You are stubborn,” he said. “I got to hand it to you.”

  “Who else would stay involved with you? You’d steamroll anyone who didn’t know her own mind.”

  “Y’know, a couple of other women have told me that, too. Though they added a few more choice words.” He grinned. “When they were breaking up with me, that is.” He let the grin fade. “But Maya, your talent isn’t anything to be stubborn about. It’s dangerous to just let it lie.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know that.”

  “Okay. That’s step one.”

  He waited. I said nothing. He sighed with too much drama.

  “Oh shut up!” I snapped.

  “Okay.” With a grin he turned toward the kitchen. “I want a beer. You want some brandy?”

  “Please, just a little bit though.”

  When he came back with the drinks, he brought a package of corn chips with them, food to help dispel the ritual mood. He sat down next to me on the couch, and for a few minutes, while I crunched through a handful of chips, I could fool myself into thinking we were having a normal evening. Tor broke the illusion.

  “It’s so damn weird that I didn’t pick up any trace of Nils.”

  “Do you think the Frost Giant kid was wrong? Maybe there isn’t any ghost.”

  “If his mother saw it, there’s something on the loose here. It might not be a dead vitki in some literal sense.”

  “That’s almost worse.”

  “There isn’t any almost about it. I mastered Nils. I wouldn’t have had any trouble sending him on. Who the hell knows what she saw? The etinwife, I mean.”

  “The bear spirit, maybe?”

  “No. She’d recognize that.”

  “What about the guy who owned this house before you?”

  “I didn’t pick up any traces of magic when I moved in. I exorcised everything just to make sure. He was some kind of art collector, poor guy. He died of AIDS, and his partner wanted to sell the house fast and move on with his life.”

  “I bet, yeah. That’s really sad.”

  Tor paused for a long swallow of beer from the bottle. “Huh,” he said. “I wonder.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not going to like this.”

  “Since when has that ever stopped you?”

  “I wonder if the etinwife saw your talent. It might as well be dead, considering how you ignore it.”

  “Oh lay off! I’m still thinking about it. What you said, I mean, about the danger.”

  “If you don’t control these things they can control you. Look what happened when Nils attacked you. I know you didn’t mean to kill him. But you didn’t know when to stop.”

  I felt too sick at the truth of this to answer.

  “I’m sorry,” Tor went on. “I know I can be kind of pushy. Well, sometimes.”

  I felt better enough to laugh, just because it was such an understatement. He grinned and let the subject drop.

  Unfortunately, the subject refused to drop me. Why was I afraid of my so-called talents? His remarks about the past life I couldn’t remember hit me hard. I’d been having a recurring dream about a window covered with heavy wooden shutters, carved here and there with runes and other ancient symbols. In the dreams I’d approach the window with the idea of opening the shutters, but every time, I’d back away and leave them closed. In the obscure way that dreams have, I knew that they were concealing something about my past.

  My mother had often talked about past lives. They were a tenet of the Buddhist faith her family held, part of a small community of believers in their native Indonesia. I’d never really believed her talk of incarnations until I met Tor. He remembered me from the 1850s, he’d told me, and listening to him, I remembered, too. We’d lived in Copenhagen and been adulterous lovers, a furtive, passionate affair until my husband had shot him in a duel. I’d drowned myself in the winter-dark Baltic Sea. I could remember dying far more clearly than I remembered the rest of that life itself. In my memory a few pieces remained—the Romany father who’d sold me to a brutal husband, the husband himself, Björn, and the man Tor had been then—none of them as vivid as the cold water that closed over my head when my heavy winter clothing dragged me under. Remembering made me choke for breath.

  Considering how awful the Copenhagen life was, I refused to blame myself for wanting to leave the next installment alone. Let it lie in the shadows of forgetting, I thought, if only it would stay there. Besides, I faced a more immediate problem. That night, before we went to bed, I looked out of the window and saw the moon gleaming in the clear sky. Just one more thin slice of light along its edge, and it would be full.

  Tor never ate breakfast except during the build-up to the full moon. That morning he grimly worked his way through a pound of steak so rare I couldn’t look at his plate. Not that it disgusted me—I was fighting the urge to ask him if I could lick up the blood after he was done with the meat. This symptom of my disease was something new. I’d never craved blood before I’d bitten Nils.

  “What’s wrong?” Tor said. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”

  “Just thinking about what happened.”

  “Nils, you mean.”

  “Yeah.” I concentrated on my pure white yogurt.

  “Well, he can’t threaten you anymore.”

  When he finished eating, Tor prepared his lair, as he called the bedroom during the full moon. He put cooked meat and fish into the little refrigerator and laid some old blankets on the floor. The bjarki disliked sleeping on the actual bed.

  “Transformation’s getting close,” he said. “Let me feed you now.”

  Before the bear took him over, Tor gave me every scrap of élan I could incorporate. He summoned more for himself, too, kept feeding both of us as the afternoon waned. Just before sunset and moonrise I locked him into the lair with a normal lock, a deadbolt, and finally a safety chain.

  “I love you, Tor! I’ll be right here when you come back.”

  He made a sound half-way between a word and a roar. I knew the transformation had begun. Although the spirit took over his mind and his behavior every month, Tor’s physical body always fought against the spell. It stayed human, though at the price of a lot of pain.

  For a few minutes I stood by the door and listened to him shuffling
back and forth and growling to himself. He chuffed, then roared and slammed into the door. The bjarki was trying to escape. By the time the ordeal ended, Tor would have bruises all over his body.

  I backed off and ran into the living room to cry where he couldn’t hear me. Knowing how badly he hurt stabbed me worse than any physical pain. In a couple of minutes I heard the bjarki whimpering and moaning in its lair. Even though Tor’s body stayed human, I always thought of the bjarki as a different being, a something, not a someone, and definitely not Tor. Yet inside the bjarki he still existed, and he hurt.

  But the bear spirit was female. What was she doing, trying to turn Tor into a bear so she could have him for herself?

  “I’ll kill you first,” I whispered aloud.

  Rage, pure hot flaming rage—but the next moment I felt utterly stupid to be jealous of a spirit bear, female or not. My face burned with embarrassment, even though no one was around to see. I hurried into the bathroom, ran the cold water in the basin, and plunged my face into the soothing chill.

  When I got myself back under control, I called Brittany.

  “I saw the moon,” she said. “It must have started.”

  “Yeah. I just needed to hear your voice. I’ll call Cyn later.”

  “You know we’re here for you, so okay, call any time. And I’ve got some news. Dr. Mellars says Roman’s turned a corner. He was really pleased.”

  “I am so totally glad to hear that.”

  “I bet! The doctor thinks the antibiotics did it. Huh, we know why.”

  “Don’t try to tell him, though.”

  “Of course not! But you stay in touch with us, okay? And eat something. Veggies!”

  When I clicked off, I followed her advice and forced myself to eat. I had to keep my strength up and conserve all the élan I could until Tor came back to himself. When I finished the few scraps of salad I managed to choke down, I sat on the couch with my sketchbook and pastels and thought about the landscape forms that Harper wanted to see. I started drawing tree trunks and branches, just isolated rough shapes, twisted, barren of leaves. On the next page I drew boulders pushing up through parched earth.

  A phone rang—not mine, Tor’s—locked in with him. Tor had a wolf howling for a ring tone, his idea of a joke. I heard the bjarki roar and growl at what it assumed was a real wolf, infringing on its territory. Who would be calling, anyway? Tor’s guy friends knew about the full moon transformation. The person who’d called the lawyer? How could he have gotten Tor’s number, unless he was one of Nils’ friends and knew about the hated nephew? After five rings the wolf fell silent. I realized that I’d been holding my breath and let it out with a gasp for air.

  The bjarki continued pacing back and forth, growling, searching for the wolf, I assumed, in his lair. I went back to my drawings. If I concentrated hard enough, I could ignore the sound. Finally he fell silent. I crept up to the bedroom door and listened. As far as I could tell from the soft whimpers and breathy snores, he’d fallen asleep right against the door.

  Knowing he slept I could try to sleep myself. I went into the Burne-Jones bedroom and lay down, but I kept waking up to listen for a possible prowler. What if someone tried to break into the flat to get Nils’ papers? A car going by seemed like a threat. Once I thought I heard something tap at the window. My heart started pounding even though the sound never repeated. I got up and walked around the entire flat, turned on some lights, too, found nothing. Since I was afraid to go downstairs, I knelt by the heater vent in the living room and listened. Nothing moved that I could hear.

  Finally I was tired enough to go back to bed. I woke to the gray light of dawn and the sound of the bjarki ramming himself against the bedroom door, a dull thud that echoed through the silent flat. Now and then he roared, as deep as a lion’s roar but breathier. I got out of bed and staggered into the kitchen to make coffee. One night down, two to go.

  I’d lived through Tor’s full moon change twice before. While I could never have gotten used to the experience, by then I did know several important things. He would come back. He wasn’t going to die. I wouldn’t die from lack of élan before he returned to himself. I could call Cynthia or Brittany every time I felt panic building. By repeating all of these things to myself, I managed to stay calm at least part of the time, at least during the day. I drew ideas for my senior project, and I wrote more chunks of the history of my relationship with Tor.

  I also kept wondering about that female bear spirit. What was she doing to my boyfriend in that locked room? I told myself that being jealous was a waste of energy. She was hurting him, not seducing him. I tried again to draw her in the muddled thought that maybe I could pull her out of the room, fix her on paper, and make her leave him alone. I never got a convincing image. She stayed out of my reach. When I looked bears up on the Internet, I found out that the female bear is called a ‘sow’. I’ll admit I found that insulting term satisfying.

  No one ever called Tor’s phone again. But still, on the second night I had trouble sleeping. Noises that had seemed normal, reassuring even, just a few days before now made me wake up and lie in bed with my heart pounding. Approaching cars in particular seemed to announce danger coming, even though they always drove on by. I’d calm myself and manage, eventually, to go back to sleep.

  Tor had given me so much élan before he went into the lair that I felt fine until moonrise on the third night. At that point my hands began to ache. I rubbed them, but inexorably my knuckles turned red and swelled. My wrists followed suit. By midnight, my knees and hips hurt so bad that I could barely walk. I left the light on in the Burne-Jones bedroom because I’d become afraid of the dark as well as of the evil eye of the moon, glaring down over the city outside. I took off all my clothes except for an oversized tee shirt, because my bra and the waistband of my shorts hurt where they touched my skin. Even though the thermometer told me the room was warm, I felt cold.

  Symptoms like these always made it clear that without a source of élan, I’d die. For years I’d stolen it in bits and drips from healthy people. I never wanted to have to live that way again. Maybe, if I found my talents, I could learn to harvest élan for myself. I wouldn’t be feel so dependent on Tor. Right then I had to conserve every scrap of élan I had.

  I huddled under a blanket. I’d just dozed off when a buzzing, beeping alarm went off. I sat bolt upright. The harsh noise came from outside, from somewhere behind the house. I got out of bed and pulled on my shorts, then ran to the kitchen window. Up on the hill behind our house, lights flashed on and off in rhythm with the screech of the alarm. The landline phone in the kitchen rang. The security system! I grabbed the receiver.

  “Mrs. Thorlaksson?” a male voice said.

  “Yes.” Of course Tor would put me down as his wife. “The alarms—”

  “A prowler alert, yes. We’re sending police. Where’s Mr. Thorlaksson?”

  I had a sleep-fogged inspiration. “Away on a business trip.”

  “The police should be there within five minutes.”

  “I can hear the siren now.”

  “Excellent! We’ll follow up with the police, but call back if you need anything else.”

  I hung up, then punched in the code to silence the alarm. I ran to the Burne-Jones bedroom and put on shoes, jeans, and a cardigan sweater so I could look a little bit respectable. The siren wailed closer and closer, then stopped in front of the house. As I went down, I turned on the stairwell lights and the lights in the library room of the lower flat.

  Two officers waited at the door. I opened it just as far as the safety chain would allow until I could see that they really were uniformed cops with badges and police-issue utility belts, guns and all. At that point I opened it wide.

  “Is the house secure?” one of the police officers said.

  “Yes, it was the outside alarm that went.”

  “We’ll take a look around back.” He paused, listening. “Do you have dogs?”

  Distantly we could hear the bjarki, growling
and making a sound that could have a bark from a very large dog.

  “Only one, and I’ve locked him in the bedroom.”

  “Good. He sounds angry enough to take a bite out of one of us.”

  As well as their guns, the policemen each had a big heavy flashlight that looked like it could double as a weapon. They set off around the side of the house. I shut the front door and shot the deadbolt, then sat down on the stairs to wait. Upstairs the bjarki fell silent. I wondered if in the prison of his spirit possession Tor knew that help had arrived. It was uncomfortable, sitting on the narrow stairs, but I was afraid to go into the library room, where a restless spirit might be waiting for me, a threat that neither the cops nor the alarm company could touch.

  The police officers returned to the front door in about fifteen minutes. All clear, they told me, but they suggested I leave the security lights glowing on the hillside.

  “By now the prowler knows that you’ve got a good alarm system,” one officer said. “So he’ll probably stay away. But let’s not take chances.”

  After they left, I went back upstairs and re-armed the entire security system. I figured I’d never get back to sleep, but once I lay down, I was so tired that I drifted off. I woke just before sunrise. When I looked out of the window, I saw the pale and gibbous moon lingering on the western horizon. I wanted to scream at it to hurry up and set. Instead I took a shower, which gave me just enough energy to put on a pair of loose shorts—nothing else—and go into the living room. I took the keys from the mantel and watched the sun rise from the eastern window. As the golden light brightened, I heard Tor call me from the bedroom.

  I limped as fast as I could down the hall and called back, “I’m right here!”

  “Good! You can open the door.”

  My aching fingers nearly dropped the keys, but I forced them to behave. Inside lay the help I desperately needed. I managed to get the locks undone at last. I shoved the keys into the pocket of my shorts and hurried into a room filled with sunlight and élan. I felt as if I’d plunged into a pool of scented warm water. Tor was casting off all the élan he’d stockpiled to allow him to deal with his body’s attempts to transform. I sobbed once in relief, then concentrated on breathing, soaking up every shred of the precious life force that came my way.