“You hold that where you’d like it to hang,” he said, “and I’ll knot the thongs together.”
I considered different placements, then held the disc comfortably below the collarbone. I hate chokers, any kind of jewelry that clings to my neck. Although the sensation of energy persisted, I felt it as pleasant rather than annoying. Tor picked up the loose thongs and knotted them. When his fingers brushed the back of my neck, I felt a shiver of a different kind of energy, a perfectly natural animal feeling, run down my spine. For a moment he stayed where he was, so close, so inviting—all I had to do was lean back into his arms, and he’d take over. I stepped forward instead.
“Thank you,” I said. “I want to see how this looks in a mirror. It’s really beautiful.”
“You’re welcome.”
His voice stayed steady, but when I turned around, I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d just like to get to know you better before we get—well—involved. If we do.”
“If.” Tor looked down at the floor. “I can’t blame you. You haven’t seen the worst of me, Maya. I know that.”
“The bjarki, you mean.”
“What else?”
“I just feel like I owe you—” I was about to say, owe you an explanation, nothing more than that, but he interrupted with a snarl.
“You don’t owe me anything but the terms of our agreement. What do you think I want? Sex with you even if it makes you feel like a cheap whore?”
I stammered out a few words. He turned fast, walked away, hurried downstairs, and I heard him slam the door behind him.
“Well, no,” I said to the jade mountain sculpture. “Not a cheap whore. An expensive one.”
I followed Tor downstairs. In the lower flat he’d gone into the walk-in closet that held the lectern and the wall safe. When I came in, he was standing at the lectern in a pool of light from an overhead lamp and looking at a folio of black and white prints. One of the long skinny drawers in the storage unit stood half-open.
“Yeah?” His voice sounded perfectly pleasant, and he’d sheltered his eyes behind the nerd illusion.
“I wanted to tell you,” I said, “that no, I don’t feel I owe you anything except doing the job you hired me for. As for the—well, the sex—if I ever decide to sleep with you, it’ll be because I want to. No other reason.”
The illusion vanished. Despite the torment in his eyes, he smiled. “Okay,” he said. “thank you.” He paused, considered, and smiled again. “I like that. It gives me hope.”
“Hope? For what?” I had the goopy idea that he meant ‘hope that maybe you’ll fall for me.’
“That someday I can be happy for one whole day without thinking about the bjarki.”
He looked down at the open folio on the lectern. When I followed his gaze, I saw an engraving of two hunters, skinning a dead bear in blood-stained snow.
Chapter 5
Whatever magic Tor put into the bindrunes worked. I had no more sensations of being watched, even when I drove down to the local mall on Saturday afternoon. I’d not felt well all morning—the usual aches and pains in my joints, the clammy-cold sweat. By the time I finished buying a few sundries, toothpaste, deodorant, little things like that, my blouse was sticking to my back. I felt dizzy enough to sit down and rest on a convenient bench. The hunger kept building in my blood. I found myself staring at the people passing by, the young men arrogant in their health, the women who giggled and flirted, secure in their youth. I wanted their life. I needed it, I craved it, I had to have the élan that oozed from their bodies, a healing mist. I felt it that day more strongly than I had in years. Death was walking behind me, I felt, stalking, moving in closer.
At the same time I hated the craving. I hated my disease. I hated myself.
I got up and began to walk through the mall to places where the crowd looked thick and ripe, in front of computer stores and the kind of clothing outlets that cater to the young and healthy. In the weekend crowd I managed to accidentally on purpose bump into a number of people, just by stopping abruptly to gawk at store windows when I should have moved aside. I made sure to siphon élan only from the kind of person who could regenerate the smidgen I took in a couple of minutes—or so I hoped. They’d never done me any harm, none of the people I stole from. That thought always hurt whenever I went hunting, kind of like having a thorn in your conscience.
The sense of relief kept me going. Every time I drained élan, just a bit, just a quick slurp of life, I felt the hunger ease. For a few moments I felt healthy and strong enough to hunt again, to take a smidgen from the guy in tennis clothes, the girl gazing at a window full of sexy underwear. Slowly the level built in my body. I began to feel almost normal, almost healthy as the energy I stole seeped into my blood and bones. But the guilt rose as well. The thorn in my conscience pricked and dug.
Sometimes it hurt less than others. My big coup of the day came when I went to buy vitamins. A pair of overly muscled guys in sweats were blocking the entrance to the health food outlet. They smirked when they saw me walking toward them and stayed where they were, waiting for the pretty girl to touch them as she pushed a way between them. Fair game, I figured, and slurped up a lot of energy from each of them. As it slid down my parched throat, I felt strong enough to run and laugh or even dance out in the sunlight. When I left the shop, the pair had already gone. They probably needed naps. As for me, my death had lost my trail. It would find me again, but for a few days, I was safe.
I was heading for the exit when I realized someone was staring at me. I’d stopped for a legitimate look into the window of a clothing store, because it held a display of linen blouses that I wished I could afford. In the reflection I saw a young man with pale hair, slender, dressed in jeans and a gray hoodie across the corridor. Although he was standing in front of a computer store, he had his back to the display and was watching me. My back prickled with fear. The bindrune could protect against magic, not the ordinary physical gaze. I left the window and started walking again, but I stopped suddenly and looked behind me. There he was, and this time he’d gotten close enough to look familiar. I’d known him somewhere, some time a long time ago. He ducked into a bookstore, so fast that I knew he’d done it to hide from me.
Who was he, why was he so familiar—but then I remembered the illusionist. I paused and tried to gather my thoughts. Who is he, who is he really? I turned the words into a mantra and waited. When he stepped out of the bookstore, the young man in the hoodie seemed to shimmer, melt, and turn into someone else. I recognized him for real: the older man who looked like Tor except for his gray hair and little paunch.
I hurried back toward the center of the mall, where I’d seen a couple of security guards earlier. Every time I looked into a shop window, I saw the middle-aged guy still following me, weaving through the crowd, getting closer and closer. When I reached the big marble atrium, I saw the two guards talking together at a coffee stand. I stopped walking and spun around. My shadow stopped about five feet away. He had Tor’s strong jaw, his height, his thick straight hair—but malice shone in his blue eyes. He wore expensive, sleek clothes, a silk shirt, tailored slacks. When he realized I was confronting him, he took a quick step back.
“Stop following me, you creep!” I raised my voice deliberately. “Leave me alone!”
He stared, absolutely stunned, as if he’d been attacked by a sheep.
“I don’t even know who you are,” I went on, “so stop it!”
Several older women paused, looked, and took a few steps closer to me. The guy shoved his hands into the pockets of his pale blue slacks.
“Don’t give me that!” His dark voice dripped arrogance. “You know damn well who I am. You’ve got to remember me.”
“I don’t.” I snapped. “Except you’re a creep who follows girls around. A stalker, that’s what you are! You’ve been following me in your car, too.”
I felt rather than saw someone hurrying up behind me. I glan
ced over my shoulder and saw a security guard, his mouth set and grim.
“All right, fella,” he said. “Leave the girl alone! In fact, why don’t you just leave?”
Once again the guy stared in utter disbelief. I could practically read his thoughts from his expression of sheer outrage: how dare this person speak to me this way! The two older women walked over to stand next to me. The security guard laid a hand on the billy club hanging from his belt. The guy turned and strode off, head up, back straight, the picture of frustrated arrogance.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” the guard said. “You don’t live alone, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I live with my boyfriend.”
“Good. If that jerk bothers you again, call the police, okay?”
“I will, and thank you.” I turned to the older women and smiled. “And thank you, too,”
“Just be real careful,” one of them said. “Tell your boyfriend about this guy.”
“I will. For sure.”
Although I stayed on my guard when I was driving back, I never saw the car I’d previously seen the stalker driving. I did see lots of expensive gray or silver cars, which meant nothing. It was possible, I reminded myself, that he could rent different models if he really had something criminal in mind—like maybe rape. Or was that too normal? If he were another sorcerer, if he was the guy who’d sent the illusions, who’d spied on me magically before Tor had given me the talisman, who knew what he might have in mind?
Tor wasn’t my boyfriend, of course, but I made sure to tell him about the stalker as soon as I returned to the flat. As he listened, his eyes narrowed, and he set his jaw in anger.
“If he comes around here,” Tor said. “I’ll deal with him, all right. Look, be real careful, will you? When you’re driving back and forth to school. And especially if you go out at night.”
“I will, for sure. I’ll stick to busy streets. He can’t pull anything down on Broadway.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Okay. I’m going to go downstairs and cast the staves. I want to see if I can pick up something more about this bozo.”
He spoke as calmly and with as much conviction as if he’d told me he was going to look the guy up in a phonebook. Maybe it’s that easy for him, I thought. I had no way of knowing, either way.
Whether it was listening to Brittany talk about vibes and auras, or to Tor explaining runes and the gods, I began to feel as if I were being sensitized to magic. My father’s talk of using ritual magic to alter consciousness had always seemed plausible but distant. My mother’s Buddhist beliefs had struck me as real, but I didn’t want Nirvana, not yet, anyway. I wanted to live.
The things happening around me came from an older, more frightening but more immediate set of beliefs. Shamanism, Mom would have called it, Tor and his gods and magical markings on wood and stone. An enemy shaman could throw things into Tor’s house, pictures and sounds, and he meant both of us harm. Worst of all, he could look like someone else when he wanted to. I’d have to be on guard against illusions. I took to constantly looking around me, always checking out the shadows, the corners of rooms, anything that might hide some evil thing. I flipped back and forth between laughing at the idea that Tor would turn into a bear and feeling terrified by the possibility. Once the moon became full, I told myself, I’d know if it were true or not.
Tor had become just as jumpy, he told me that afternoon. He also checked his email every half-hour or so, even though he made fun of himself for doing it. It took until Sunday night, though, for his sister to answer him. Even then, all she said was “I’ll look into it.”
“I was afraid of that,” Tor said. “She probably won’t go into town again till next week. Oh well, I should be over the damn change by then.”
We were sitting in the living room that evening with the drapes open so we could see the western view. It was a gorgeous clear summer night in the East Bay, although San Francisco wore its usual halo of fog. Tor shut down his laptop and placed it on the coffee table.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, “how much longer will you be in summer school?”
“Three more weeks. Then we have a month off before the regular session starts.”
“Were you planning on taking any evening classes?”
“No. Pretty much all the units I need to graduate are in studios and workshops. Natural light is a must. Some of the basic drawing classes run at night, and the required English and history stuff, but I had those in my first year.”
“That’s a relief. Then you’ll be able to be here in the evenings, the ones I’ll need you for, I mean.” His eyes turned grim, and his face slackened. “It’ll be the full moon in a few days.”
I turned in my chair to look out of the east-facing window. The moon had risen over the hills, a pale silvery gold, waxing at its first quarter.
As the week went on, Tor grew more and more silent, turned inward, frightened and yet resigned. He reminded me of a man facing a dangerous surgery, like maybe a heart by-pass or organ transplant, something of that magnitude, anyway, that could kill him. All he could do was hope that he’d come through the ordeal, because the only way to avoid it was to die.
I picked up his mood. Every day I rushed home from school, half-expecting to find that he’d hanged himself as a sacrifice to Odin. Could this bjarki business possibly be real? Something had chewed up the closet door. Tor just didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d make up an elaborate lie and provide props for it. If it was true, I wondered if I’d be able to do what he needed when he was in bear form. What if the bjarki got out of his lair? How could I put him back in? I had no idea if the Tor inside the bear would even remember who I was. The thought of those gouges in the door of his room made me shiver.
Thursday afternoon I found a stack of paperback books on the coffee table. Tor had gone shopping and bought me translations of all kinds of Norse and Icelandic literature, myths and old sagas.
“More good stories,” he told me. “Kind of grim reading, but I dunno, no worse than the stuff they show in the movies.”
“Thanks! This is all really interesting. Everyone hears about the Vikings, but there’s this whole other side to their world. I didn’t know about it before.” I picked up a book and thumbed through it. “How do you pronounce this guy’s name?” I said. “En-jall?”
“Nuh-yall. He gets burned alive.”
Like Tor said, no worse than the stuff they show in the movies.
That night the moon rose just after we’d eaten supper. Tor got up from the breakfast bar and stared out the east window. His shoulders slumped, and he caught his breath in a near-sob.
“Gods in heaven,” Tor said. “I’m so tired.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Everything turns inward, the day before. All my energy, I mean.” He turned back to look at the moon and shuddered, then walked, as bent and slow as an old man, into the living room.
I cleared off the supper dishes and put them in the dishwasher. By the time I joined him, he was sitting slouched in one of the leather chairs, so still that for a moment I thought he’d slipped into a faint or trance state.
“Tor?” I said.
Slowly, as if his neck pained him, he looked my way.
“You okay?”
“For now.” He returned to staring out the east-facing window. “The moon’s position starts the process, not the moonlight. That’s just reflected sunlight. It’s got something to do with tidal forces, I think.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Not exactly. It’s a weird sensation. I have to suck up energy for the change, gather it in. It’s hard to describe.”
“You can get this energy from the air?”
“Yeah. I always take as much as I can, just in case. It’s a lot more than I need and makes me feel bloated, but I’d hate to get stuck in bear form and not be able to get back. That’s my worst nightmare. I’d have to figure out some way to kill myself.”
His quiet sincerity frightened me. I could no lon
ger dismiss the bjarki as a sorcerer’s weird idea of a joke. Whether or not he really turned into a bear, he believed he did, and it tormented him. I walked over behind his chair and laid my hands on his shoulders.
“Let me rub them,” I said. “You look so uncomfortable.”
“Thanks. I am.”
I dug into his shoulders in a real massage, and he sighed, pleased. I kept it up, working on his neck, too, until I felt the tendons and muscles relax under my fingers. He was paying me to take care of him, I figured, during this part of the month. I was glad I could do something to earn the money. Now and then I felt a wisp of the élan he was gathering come my way. I never would have stolen from him, but I saw nothing wrong with capturing the stray bits and fragments that hung loose in the air behind him. He never noticed.
Tor watched the moon all evening. He staggered into his room at ten o’clock to go to bed. He slept late the next morning, staggering out again just as I got home from class. He fried up a whole pound of bacon. Although he offered me some, I turned it down, and he ate the entire pound, nothing else, just the bacon. In the afternoon, he went to the local grocery store and came back with bunches of greens and a whole salmon. He unwrapped the fish, cut it up, and stowed it in the little refrigerator in his bathroom.
“I hate having to chew the plastic wrap off,” he told me. “It tastes really bad.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “By the way, you look exhausted.”
“I am.” He began to pluck at the fabric of his shirt as if it itched wherever it touched him. “You’d better lock me in now.” He opened the door. “See you in three days. Whatever you do, don’t let me out unless the place is on fire. Okay?”
“I promise. Look, I was thinking of going back to campus for a figure drawing session. They’re informal, I don’t have to go, but I hate to miss them. Would that be okay?”
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