Sorcerer's Luck

by Katharine Kerr

  He lowered his arms and leaned forward from the waist at an odd angle. “Come lock me in.” His voice had coarsened, turned low and grating. “Right now.”

  He bolted for the master suite. It took me a moment to find the keys. By the time I remembered to look on the mantel, where I’d put them the day before, my pulse was pounding in my throat. My hands shook so badly that I had trouble getting the key into the lock. I made myself stop and breathe, just breathe for a long couple of moments. I could hear Tor pacing back and forth inside. Finally I managed the key, shot the deadbolt, and put on the safety chain. On the other side of the door he moaned, a long drawn-out moan that rose to a growl, then fell back into misery.

  “Tor!” I called out. “Remember who you are!”

  He threw himself against the door and roared, scratched and scrabbled at the wood. If I turned into an actual bear, I could pull that door right off its hinges. He’d told me that. I wanted to scream. Instead I made my voice as gentle as I could.

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

  He fell quiet for perhaps a minute and a half. The moaning started again. I walked away.

  I put the sausages back into the refrigerator. The thought of eating anything nauseated me, although I knew I’d have to have food eventually. I had to keep my strength up. I—no, we, both of us—had long days and nights ahead of us. I’d grown so used to being fed whenever I wanted that the thought of being on my own panicked me. Panic only drained élan, I reminded myself. Breathe deeply, imagine flowers, a field of beautiful yellow flowers—my heart returned at last to its normal rhythm.

  I went to the living room, where Tor’s laptop sat on the coffee table. He’d plugged it via a transformer into a wall socket so it wouldn’t run out of power—even if I did. I giggled at the thought, a sick little stupid sound. I made myself stop. I could hear Tor whining, moaning, at the door just down the hall. Any time, at any moment, I could boot up the laptop, access the cam, and see what was tormenting him, see him in his strangely transformed condition, see at last the creature he became.

  It took me three hours to work up the courage.

  The entire time, Tor moaned and growled. Occasionally he scratched on the door.

  Finally, close to noon, after I’d made myself eat, I sat down on the couch and faced the laptop. Even then, I had to take a good many deep, soothing breaths before I could boot up. Even after that, it took me a couple of minutes to access the camera images. I hit sat back on the couch, and forced myself to open my eyes and watch.

  Tor crouched in the middle of the unmade bed. He’d stripped off the jeans; they lay on the floor nearby. His body was still human, no pelt, no bear’s face, no claws, but his posture, the way he hunched over, the way he swung his head from side to side—pure animal. He tipped back his head and roared with a snap of his jaws. Drool spattered and ran. He rolled over to the edge of the bed and jumped down. On hands and knees he crawled over to the bedroom door, then sat back on his haunches. His hands grabbed at the door knob—both of them, fingers held together, as he tried to grasp it between what he must have seen as paws. The door trembled but stayed shut.

  He moaned, whined, swung his head back and forth, then clambered to his feet. He rammed a shoulder against the door, fell back, and moaned so piteously at what must have been the pain that my eyes filled with tears. I broke—leaned forward, stopped the record, closed down the app, turned off the laptop. I’d promised him that I’d record at intervals during the bjarki’s domination. I’d done all I could stand of the first session.

  I felt like crawling myself, but I walked over to the open window and the patch of sunlight and sat down in it. Maybe some of the élan would filter into my body on its own if I was lucky. The warmth soothed me, no matter what the mysterious life force was doing. I fell asleep right there on the floor. When I woke, the sun had moved on to the other side of the flat. I heard Tor roaring and growling down the hall in the master suite.

  I got up and went into my bedroom. On the writing desk a new figure had appeared: a hairy, filthy man naked except for a wrap of rags around his loins. He crouched on a strip of grass and gnawed on a bone. In a circle around him flew tiny vultures. I wanted to throw a towel over the desk so I wouldn’t have to see its images, but I was afraid of offending it. At some point I might need its advice.

  At twilight, when the silver glow of the rising moon hovered over the eastern hills, I forced myself to boot up the laptop and camera again. We’d set the system up to record to a three gig thumb drive, so computer memory presented no problems. My own memory was a different matter. I knew that no matter what happened, no matter how many times Tor had to suffer the bjarki’s domination or how few, I would never be able to forget what I’d seen.

  With the moon shining full and strong, he hurt. His pain was obvious even in the images onscreen. He moaned and whimpered as he crawled on all fours, back and forth, shuffling across the bedroom floor. Now and then he stopped and lay down, stretched out, then curled up, over and over, moaning in agony the entire time. I wept. I could not stop myself. He writhed and rolled, got back to hands and knees, began shuffling toward the window, then turned and shuffled back again. He stopped, lay down, and curled into a fetal ball. He began to lick his right arm as if he were trying to soothe the pain.

  I moaned with him and turned off the screen and the speakers, but I let the laptop continue to record direct from the camera. This moonrise phase was important, I figured, and he’d want the data when he came back to himself. I could still hear him, of course, through the door. He’d put the bag of earplugs in my bedroom. I was just about to fetch them when Cynthia called me. I took my phone all the way down the hall past my bedroom to make sure she couldn’t hear Tor’s moans and roars.

  “Say,” Cynthia said. “Did you guys want to go to a movie tonight? Jim’s actually feeling sociable.”

  “We can’t,” I said. “Tor’s sick.”

  “God, that’s too bad! What’s he got?”

  I considered lying. I was going to say “food poisoning.” I was too aware that this same curse would fall upon us every month, every damned lunar month, thirteen times a year.

  “It’s the full moon,” I said. “He’s under the domination of the bear. The bjarki.”

  Silence, a long dead-air period of silence.

  “Maya,” Cynthia said eventually. “You sound so tired and shaky that I’m half inclined to believe you.”

  “It’s true. I am not joking. At the full moon he—well, he doesn’t actually turn into a bear.” I got a sudden insight. “He gets possessed by the spirit of a bear. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s like some entity from the spirit world grabs hold of him. He acts like a bear. He’s not a bear. But oh god, he’s suffering.”

  “Maya!” Her voice rose in a small shriek.

  “I’m not lying.” I snuffled back a mouthful of tears. “Look, call Brittany, will you? Tell her what I told you. She’ll explain.”

  Again the silence, trembling with shock. I wondered if I were about to lose one of my closest friends. Cynthia drew in a deep, audible breath.

  “Okay,” she said. “I will do that. I did talk with her earlier today. I wanted to see how your brother was doing. Better, by the way. But anyway, she went on and on about Tor being some kind of magician. A runemaster, she called him. Are you going to tell me she was right?”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m telling you. But it’s real dangerous work.”

  “Guess it must be. Is that what got him this spirit or whatever it is?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “Look, I’ll let you go. I’ll call back after I’ve talked to Brittany.”

  While I waited for her return call, I ate something. I don’t remember what. When I finished, I turned on all the lamps in the living room, kitchen, my bedroom, and the bathroom across from it. I wanted to fill the flat with light. I gathered my drawing materials and laid them out on t
he coffee table near the laptop. I’d just sat down on the couch when Cynthia called. Once again, I took the phone down the hall.

  “When I told Brit what you told me,” Cynthia said, “she said ‘I thought so!’ She was just surprised he wasn’t a werewolf. Or a tiger, she said. I guess those are supposed to be more common than bears.”

  “In Indonesia they are, tiger spirits, I mean. My mom talked about them sometimes. But Tor’s from the Northlands.”

  “Okay. If any of this makes sense, that makes sense.”

  “Do you believe us?”

  “I believe you because you guys are you and you are my friends. That’ll have to do for now.”

  “It’s enough. Thank you.” I choked back tears. “I mean that. Thank you.”

  “So okay, as Brit would say. Is there anything I can do to help? I’ll do it.”

  I considered. I had plenty of ordinary food. Tor was safely locked in. I was willing to bet that Nils presented no threat, either. The one thing I longed for—another source of élan—was the one thing I would never take from my friends.

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “I’ll call now and then. Just to check in. So will Brit.” Cynthia hesitated briefly. “Hang in there. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Just knowing you guys know—god, it really helps.”

  “Good. I’m going to go online and see what I can find out about these animal spirits. Knowledge is power and all that crap.”

  I managed to laugh, and we ended the call.

  Knowing they knew, knowing they were still my friends—it gave me enough strength to pick up a sketchbook and draw. The earplugs helped, too. Through them I could still hear him when he roared, but they did cut out the painful little whimpers and moans. I knew he hurt. I could do nothing about it because I didn’t dare open the locked door.

  Still, at times my eyes filled with tears. I let them fall on the first drawing I made. I drew Tor as I knew him, fully human, dressed in jeans and his Raiders T-shirt. I knew his body so well that I got a good likeness just from memory. The tears splashed onto his chest, where I would have wept had I had been able to hold him.

  I turned the page and wondered what to draw next. A wolf, maybe, but not real wolves, not the intelligent pack animals who loved their young and lived in a hierarchical society. No, I wanted to draw the mythical kind, the lone wolves. I was thinking of Fenrir and the wolf in “Peter and the Wolf,” dangerous killers, lean, red-eyed, gaunt bodies, fangs.

  Nils. I felt him as I drew as tangibly as if he prowled around the living room. Although his mind registered on mine as under the animal’s spell, I felt none of the physical pain Tor was feeling. Nils was confused, easily distracted, but he seemed at home in the wolf body, though he paced back and forth, wherever he was, angry, filled with hate. I kept drawing, gestural studies at first, then stronger lines, more fully realized images. Under the hatred I sensed a different emotion, complex, hard to pin down at first. I turned the page and started yet another drawing.

  Disgust. Loathing at what he became under the evil stare of the full moon. Self-hatred mingled with the hatred he felt for Tor, who—the wolf lacked words. He could not tell me or himself why he hated Tor. I could find no image for it. In wolf form Nils’s mind only knew emotions and concrete images. I picked up his desire to feed on dead things and to kill Tor. He had reasons to hate Tor, but the wolf could only remember being driven from the pack where Tor’s father was alpha male.

  He couldn’t give form to what poisoned his soul, but he wanted something. This thing, an object, was prey, it was safety, it was sex—everything in life that the wolf knew as good and desirable. Tor had it. Tor refused to share it. The only possible object was the gold ornament with the runes, the one that Tor kept away from him in the safe downstairs. A lust for gold would have been too abstract for the wolf to understand, too remote from the animal’s world. The Fehu rune had pointed to the ornament. I wrote my thoughts on the same page as the drawing, notes for Tor when he came back to me.

  I looked away from the page and for the briefest of moments I saw him, the wolf with human blue eyes, staring at me. I screamed. The sight vanished, but the touch of his mind remained.

  I could no longer endure contact with Nils. He sickened me. I shut the sketchbook and flopped it down on the coffee table. The slapping sound it made against the wood broke the spell. I got up and went to the west window. By craning my neck and leaning to one side, I saw the full moon at its zenith. Only half of Night One had passed. I walked over to a floor lamp and held my hands under the light. They looked perfectly normal. So far, at least, my body held enough élan.

  I decided to stop being a coward. I sat back down and opened the laptop, turned on the monitor, and realized that with the moon so high above the window level, the bedroom had gone dark. The camera showed mostly lumps of darker shadows. I stopped recording and peered at the murky image on the screen. I could just see Tor, curled up by the bathroom door, asleep. “Thank god,” I whispered and shut down the system.

  As the days and nights of the full moon crawled by, I worked out a routine of sorts around the sessions of recording from the camera in the bedroom. Watching Tor, hearing him growl and moan, hurt like knives to the heart, but I managed to keep on top of the situation. Well, mostly I did. There were times when I broke down to see him in so much pain. But overall, because I knew what was going to happen, I could at least keep the panic element at bay. Tor would come back. He would feed me all the élan he’d stored against the bjarki transformation. I wasn’t going to die. I had friends. Either Cynthia or Brittany called every four or five hours. Talking with Brit about my brother made me remember that other people had problems of their own.

  In the intervals I drew. I had a lot of sketchpads left from when I’d first taken Tor’s job. Before the full moon came, I’d also bought some new oil pastels as well as Conté. I tried to draw normal subjects: the view from the windows, the Chinese vases in the living room. At night, though, in the times when the full moon gleamed in the window like the watchfire of an enemy army, the drawings drew themselves—pictures of Tor under the bjarki spell, of the Norse gods, of Nils, and of my father.

  I thought of Dad often when my élan began to run dangerously low. On the third morning, my knuckles swelled and turned red. My legs ached, knees first, then as the day ground on, my hips. I sweated, a constant clammy drip. I’d shower, stay comfortable for maybe an hour, and then the sweat would start oozing out of my skin again. I gulped mineral water by the tumbler full. When I thought back, I couldn’t remember my father having symptoms like mine. His hurt lay inside him, in his heart and other vital organs.

  That day I slept as much as I could, guarding every precious drop of élan. I told Brittany and Cynthia that I’d become too exhausted to talk on the phone, which was true enough. Yet that night, as it always eventually did, the full moon began to wane. I woke up in the morning to the sound of hissing water that meant Tor was taking a shower. I got out of bed, grabbed the keys, and ran naked to the door of our bedroom just as the water pulse stopped. I could hear Tor calling to me in a human voice. I opened the door and saw him grinning at me, fully human again, and as naked I was.

  “I bet I know what you want,” he said. “Come here and let me feed you.”

  “And I bet I know what you want.” I grinned in return. “I can feed while we make love. Well, assuming you’re finished with all that élan you stockpiled.”

  He laughed and enfolded me in his embrace. We fell on the bed together.

  We stayed in bed for most of the day. It wasn’t only the élan nor just the good sex that kept me there. Lying close to him, hearing his voice, seeing him smile at me, and best of all, knowing he no longer ached in every muscle and sinew—together they added up to a different kind of joy. I ran my hands through his hair, stroked his chest, kissed the bruises on his shoulders that the bjarki’s struggles had put there—”to make them be
tter,” I said. He laughed and kissed me in turn, told me he loved me over and over.

  “I can’t believe you’re still here,” he said. “I was pretty sure you’d cut and run once you saw what happened.”

  “No. It hurt to watch, but I wasn’t revolted or anything. You don’t turn into a bear. I don’t care what you see in the mirror. You stay a man, but oh my god, Tor! Do you remember the pain?”

  “Oh yeah.” His voice turned bleak. “It gets pretty bad at first.” He lay on his back and frowned at the ceiling. “I wonder if it’s because I don’t change all the way. My body keeps trying, and shit, it really burns in here.”

  “It does ease up after a while?”

  “By the third day, yeah.”

  Not fast enough to spare him much. I sat up and thought about Nils, the contact I’d made while drawing the wolf. “I bet that Nils doesn’t feel pain once he’s in varg form.”

  Tor’s eyes narrowed with questions.

  “Let’s get up and get dressed,” I said. “I want to eat, and you probably do, too. I’ve got an awful lot to tell you.”

  I had a lot to show him, as well. After we’d eaten, we sat on the couch together and paged through the drawings I’d made while the bjarki had held him in its claws. The information I’d gleaned about Nils turned Tor grim. He sat rock-still for a long time, staring at the finished drawing, until eventually he read my notes aloud in a voice that ached with fury.

  “Any more?” he said. “Pics, I mean.”

  “Not of the varg. I did do some drawings of my father in another notebook.”

  He closed the sketchbook he was holding with a snap. “I’d like to see those one day,” Tor said. “Not now. I’m in such a shit mood it would spoil the experience.” He laid the sketchbook on the coffee table. “I want to see the recordings. Get it all over with. Let me get a beer first. My back still hurts, and that’ll help. Do you want something to drink?”