“That ratty sweater he was wearing?” Brittany put in. “Cashmere. Mistreated cashmere, but still. And that wrist-watch!”
“God, I never realized you guys were so mercenary.”
“Just envious,” Cynthia said, grinning. “And glad you found him. Maya, you’ve been pushing yourself to the limit for as long as I’ve known you. Let him be Lord Bountiful for a while. You need the rest.”
Yeah, I thought to myself, but if they only knew what he was really like! They did know, of course. They just didn’t believe it. What if I told them I was a vampire? Would they believe that? My secret was too grim, too painful, too deadly, for me to imagine making it into a joke.
When I came home, I turned into the driveway as usual. I stopped the car, killed the engine, and stared. The garage door stood open, and inside sat a beautiful blue sedan. I got out of my old heap and walked up to the car, a German make, one of the really expensive ones. I glanced inside: leather upholstery in a deep-dyed tan. When I ran my fingers along the hood, the paint job felt like fine enamel, as smooth and rich as you’d find on jewelry.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me. I turned around to see Tor, grinning as he held out a set of keys.
“The title’s going to be in your name,” he said. “I’ve already called about the insurance.”
Lord Bountiful. Cynthia had nailed it.
“Tor.” I could barely speak. “I can’t take this from you.”
“Of course you can, because I want to give it to you.” He hesitated, and the grin disappeared. “Don’t you like it?”
“I love it, but, god, it must be so expensive.”
“It’s also the best engineered sedan on the market. It’ll keep you safe. Me, too, if I happen to be in it if—” He paused for emphasis. “If we have another incident like we did Saturday night. Steel frame. Top of the line air bags, front and side. All that good stuff.”
When he held out the keys again, I took them. A gadget hung from the ring that would open or lock the doors, make the car beep if I lost it in a parking lot, turn on its lights from a distance, do just about everything but phone home. Tor opened the car door and began pointing out all the other gadgets and sensors on the inlaid wood dashboard. Now and then he paused to run his hand over the upholstery or to stroke the glossy paint job.
I realized that although the car would legally be mine, he’d gotten it for himself, too, an expensive toy that he couldn’t have justified otherwise. Because he loved it so much, I could accept it.
“We should donate that old car of yours to charity,” Tor said. “They’ll probably get fifty bucks at the junkyard.”
“No,” I said. “Can’t we keep it? It’s a two-car garage.”
He tilted his head to one side and gave me his puzzled-bear look.
“I’ll need to drive it to school.”
“Why?”
“The paint on my clothes. I’d hate to mess up that gorgeous leather.”
Tor laughed. “Ever hear of seat covers? We can get some cheap ones. Terry cloth. You can throw them out when they get filthy.”
“Okay, yeah, that would work.”
The Chevy seemed to be staring at me reproachfully, as if it wanted to live, not end up squashed in a junkyard.
“I still want to keep the old one,” I said. “I bought it with my own money. My first car. I hate the thought of junking it. It’s like a pet.”
Tor rolled his eyes. “Oh okay,” he said. “Whatever.”
I got back into my old car and drove it into the garage, next to the shiny new one. I wanted to keep the Chevy just in case, I realized—just in case he found out about my disease. I’d need to leave in a hurry, and I wouldn’t want to take his generosity with me. As I was getting out of the car, Tor trotted into the garage.
“How are you feeling today?” he said. “Do you need to take a nap or something?”
"No, I feel better. Whatever you did with that rune really worked."
“Well, then.” He paused to grin. “Let’s go for a drive.”
“Okay, but there’s a couple of things I have to do first.”
“What?”
“Here’s one.” I reached up and kissed him. “Thank you,” I said. “It’s a super-sweet ride. Thank you so much! I really really love it.”
He slipped his arms around me and gave me a hug. He was grinning, so pleased and proud, so normal and happy that I hated my thoughts like this most recent one: keep the old car, just in case. Leaving him would be painful.
“And now I’ve got to change my clothes,” I continued. “My jeans have globs of paint on them. It’s acrylic, but it might not be totally dry.”
“Okay, while you do that, I’m going to get some olive oil and paint runes on her bumpers. For the protection.” He tilted his head to one side and considered me with a small smile. “What about a name?”
“How about Gretel? Like in the fairy tales.”
“Sure. That’ll do. She is German, after all.”
When we took Gretel out, I drove her first. Since the engine wasn’t broken in yet, we stuck to the streets and back roads rather than the freeways. Eventually we hit the curving roads that led through the Oakland hills. I’d never driven anything that handled so well, so smoothly, as if the car were doing half the thinking for me. Tor watched all the digital read-outs on the dashboard as avidly as a co-pilot on an airplane.
When we reached a view turn-out on a wide road, I took pity on him. I pulled over and turned in my seat to grin at him.
“Want to drive?” I said.
“Well, if you don’t mind.” Tor looked as eager as a small boy who’s just been offered ice cream. “I mean, it’s your car.”
“I want you to see how wonderful it is.”
He smiled, leaned over, and kissed me—just once. He wanted to get his hands on that wheel.
Tor decided to head back down to the city to see how Gretel handled in stop-and-go traffic. As we came down from the hills, I noticed in the side mirror another car following us, a black dot on the blacktopped road. At first the car stayed too far away for me to identify. It could have been anyone, I reminded myself. For some miles, however, it kept to the same distance.
“Tor?” I said. “Slow down, okay?”
Gretel responded so smoothly that I might not have known he’d done so—except that the other car abruptly got a lot closer. I stared into the mirror and caught sight of the black SUV before he too slowed down.
“He’s back,” I said. “We have our friend on our tail.”
“Shit!” Tor muttered. “Ruining a perfectly good day.”
He drove a little faster. The tail sped up but kept a good distance between us—about a city block’s worth. By then we’d reached the streets of a quiet residential district, bungalows and brown-shingled houses behind small lawns. When Tor stopped at a stop sign, the SUV turned into a driveway rather than come up directly behind us. When Tor started up again, the SUV pulled out and followed, still at that long distance.
“We could try going downtown,” I said. “The traffic will fill in behind us and cut him off.”
“I’ve got a better idea.”
When we reached the next cross-street, Tor pulled over and parked. The SUV did the same thing down at the other end of the block. Tor began unbuckling his seat belt.
“What are you doing?” I said. “You can’t get out of the car! What if he tries to hit you?”
“Too many witnesses around here. He wouldn’t dare.”
I grabbed him by the arm. “If he’s crazy, that won’t stop him.”
“No, but the power of the runes will.”
Before I could protest further, Tor shook my hand off his arm, opened the door, and got out. He shut the door again, then turned to look down the block toward the SUV.
“Nils!” He was yelling at the top of his lungs. “Come on, come talk to me!” He switched into Icelandic and yelled something else, then went back to English. “Tell me what’s so wrong! Let’s have it ou
t!”
I sat paralyzed. I remembered Tor calling himself a barbarian at heart. I was seeing it in the way he stood, warrior-straight, his head tipped a little back, his hands on his hips, daring his enemy to come forward and either bargain or fight. In the bay window of a nearby house, curtains twitched, and the shadowy form of a woman looked out. I was praying she’d call the police—just in case. I had my phone in my backpack, but I knew Tor would be furious if I called.
Out in the street, Tor fell silent, panting a little for breath. I returned to keeping watch on the SUV in the rearview mirror. The black hulk pulled away from the curb but hesitated out in the middle of the street.
“Come on, Nils!” Tor yelled. “Are you afraid to talk to me?”
The SUV sped forward with a grind of gears. I screamed and covered my mouth with both hands. The huge car lumbered down the street fast, too fast. It swerved toward us. Tor never moved. At the last second the SUV swerved back to the middle of the street. It sped past Tor and lurched around the corner. I could hear the engine roaring through the quiet neighborhood, then slowly fading, dying away into the distance.
Tor flung open the car door. “Fucking coward!” he said. “That had to be Nils, all right. He looks a lot like my dad.”
I caught my breath with a gulp.
“What’s wrong?” Tor said. “You look scared.”
“Of course I was scared, you idiot! What if he’d sideswiped you?”
“Oh.” Tor slid back in behind the wheel. “Yeah, that would have messed up your new car.”
“It’s not the car I was worried about.”
“I know.” He smiled. “A joke. Do you have a sketchbook in your backpack?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I got a good look at the license plate. I want to write it down in case I forget. Maybe we can trace it. He’ll try to confront me again. This was just the first step.”
“First step of what?”
“Breaking him down.” Tor gave me a totally out of place grin. “He could have killed me. But he backed off. I figured he would, and because I was right, he lost—well, I don’t know what to call it. He lost status, I guess. Or lost face. Something like that.”
I kept a constant look-out while he drove us home, but the SUV never appeared. None of the other cars that at times might have been following us turned into it, either, when I tried to puncture possible illusions. Tor said little until we reached the house. He let me out at the sidewalk, then parked Gretel and shut up the garage for the night. As he walked back to join me he was jingling the keys in his hand.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he said. “I’m going to figure out a way to challenge him. It’s stupid, sitting around waiting for his next move.”
I wanted to scream. Instead I said, and pretty calmly considering the circumstances, “You mean to a duel or a fight?”
“No, no, just to see if he’ll come forward and talk. I—” He stopped and looked away.
“What’s wrong?”
“You just gave me an idea. Let me think about this.”
He strode off, and I followed him into the house.
Chapter 9
Since we’d turned off the air conditioning before we left, the summer heat had toasted the inside of the flat. We turned it on again, but it would take an hour or so to cool the place down. Tor put together a cold dinner in a picnic basket, I grabbed one of the old blankets, and we went outside to eat in the cool of the evening.
The landscaping out in back of the house was as uninspired as the front, a big rectangle of grass, dotted here and there with dandelions and other weeds. Off to one side stood a Japanese maple that badly need pruning. Since the house stood on a terraced hillside, a stone retaining wall, about six feet high, edged the rear of the lawn to keep back the hill. Beyond the wall, the property sloped up in a profusion of scrawny trees and shrubs to the neighbor’s house a good long ways above.
“One of these days,” Tor said, “I should hire a landscaper, I guess. Unless you like to garden.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “I grew up in apartments.”
I spread out the blanket, and we sat down in the beautifully cool air. Tor opened the basket and brought out a bottle of white wine and two glasses. I poured while he set out the food. The sky had turned the velvet blue of approaching twilight. I saw off to the east two bright stars. The fluttering gold lights of an airplane climbed slowly between them as if they were beacons marking a safe road. Above us on the slope the trees rustled in a rising breeze.
“This is actually kind of fun,” I said.
“Yeah, we should do it more often, these hot days. We could even get a picnic table.”
For a while we ate in a pleasant shared silence. A few flies tried to crash the party, of course, but when Tor snapped a napkin at them, they kept their distance instead of coming right back as flies usually did. Magic, I wondered? I would have felt foolish asking him outright. Tor poured us each a second glass of wine and brought out fresh pears for dessert.
“I’ve been thinking about Nils,” he said. “The idea you gave me when you talked about a duel. I wonder if he was Björn, back then.”
“Back when?”
“When you were married to him. Björn, I mean, not Nils per se. In Copenhagen.”
“Oh. That.” I had a swallow of wine. “Do we have to talk about it?”
“Yes.” Tor looked at me with puzzled eyes. “It could be important. Look, that day he followed you around at the mall. He told you that you had to recognize him, right?”
“Right. Oh god, I never even thought much about it!”
“That’s because you didn’t know about us then. Huh.” He thought for a couple of minutes. “You might be one of the things he wants to take from me. Not that you’re a thing, not to me, anyway. He might see you as some kind of object he wants back.”
“I understand, yeah. Ohmigawd, the thought makes me feel sick.”
“It makes me furious. Do you remember why you married him?”
I started to snap at him, but I did remember, or at least, a story came to me as fast as a memory would have. I had a long swallow of wine before I said, “My father sold me to him when my mother died. I was fourteen. Björn didn’t have to marry me, really. I guess it was decent of him.”
Tor started to speak, merely stared.
“Well, gypsies didn’t have any legal rights or anything, did they?” I said. “Way back then.”
“No. Shit, I didn’t remember that part. About you being sold, I mean.”
I finished the wine in my glass and reached for the bottle.
“Do you remember Björn’s last name?” Tor said. “Details like that?”
“No.” I concentrated on refilling my glass. “I don’t want to.”
“I don’t remember a lot of them myself. Your name, his name. Then there was your maid. We had to bribe her. I don’t remember her name, but she was a skinny little rat of a girl. The cook was on your side, though. Elsa, her name was.”
He paused for a sip of wine. I realized that he believed his story about the past life and his death, just as I believed I remembered the look on Björn’s face when he returned from the duel. And the drowning. I knew I remembered that. I no longer felt like eating anything. I put the wine bottle back into the basket. Tor put his glass down, picked up a pear, and bit into it. He swallowed, then glared at the traumatized pear in his hand.
“These could be riper,” he said. “A thought. Those protection runes? You could get them tattooed somewhere on you. You wouldn’t have to worry about wearing amulets then. I could put together new bindrunes, too, if you wanted a different pattern.”
Bindrune. The word bothered me. Would he bind me to him with magic, just as Björn had bound me with guilt and terror? I realized that I remembered more than I wanted to about my marriage after the duel.
“Needles freak me out,” I said. “No tattoos. Yuck! I’d be sick the whole time the guy was doing it.”
“I
t was just a thought. When you go out, what about I draw them on you, like I did for the cramps?”
“But the ink—isn’t it going to be toxic?”
“I can get some of that stuff clowns use to paint children’s faces. It should be perfectly safe. You might need a more powerful bindrune if Björn is—”
“I don’t want to talk about him any more.”
“We’ll have to sooner or later.”
“Not now!”
“Okay, okay.” He looked mildly surprised. “What did you want to do tonight? We could go to a movie or something.”
The calm normal way he offered a night out, coming right after his talk of past lives, made me want to scream at him. Instead I just said, “No thanks. I’m really tired. I’m still bleeding.”
“Maybe later in the week, then. I need to go down to my workshop and cast the staves, anyway.”
“Workshop? Oh, the lower flat.”
“Yeah. It’ll take me a couple of hours, probably, to do all the things I have in mind. I’ve got to email a college buddy of mine. He’s a total hacker, and I bet he can trace that license number I wrote down.”
While Tor worked downstairs, I took my laptop into my room. I found my earbud, then logged on and watched clips from really dumb TV shows on YouTube. I felt like a rebellious child, but I enjoyed the clips anyway. When I heard Tor coming back upstairs, I logged off. I was just returning the laptop to my backpack when Tor appeared in the doorway.
“I heard from Aaron,” he said. “My hacker friend, y’know? He tried to find data about Nils for me. He couldn’t. He can break into the blocked phonebooks without much effort, but there was nothing on the name Nils Halversson. He must have set up a false name and identity a long time ago. Probably to get money out of the country into a Swiss bank or one of those tax-shelter islands in the Caribbean.”
“Oh god! We’re back to square one.”
“Yeah, we sure are. Now, as for the SUV, Aaron found that license plate number on the DMV site. The plates were stolen from a car in the airport parking garage a week ago. So they’re not going to tell us anything about Nils, either.”
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