“A little brandy. Please.”
Tor fetched himself a bottle of dark beer and a snifter with a moderate amount of brandy for me. Watching the recordings with him safe beside me was an entirely different experience than making them had been. I could lean back and watch him watch instead of agonizing over the video. Now and then he winced at some of the images, but he seemed strangely detached from the footage, even analytical. About half-way through he leaned forward and stopped the playback.
“That’s enough for now,” he said. “You were right. What I see during the domination is all illusion. When I’m in there, I look at my arms and see legs. I see paws. I look in the mirror and see a bear’s face looking back. I’m covered with a pelt.”
“None of that shows up here.”
“Damn right.” He stood up. “I’m going to get another beer. Want more brandy?”
“No, I’ve had plenty.”
Tor frowned at the empty bottle in his hand. “I’ll wait, too,” he said. “I want to go down and cast the rune staves.”
While he did, I took a shower. I really needed one by then. I dried my hair, put on clean clothes, and came back to the living room to find him looking back and forth from the laptop screen to a piece of sketchbook paper. He was writing with one of my felt-tips. A full bottle of beer stood on the table. He laid the pen down and held out the paper.
“Email from my sister,” Tor said. “I told her earlier about your theory. Nils being the varg, I mean. I went onto email just now to tell her you were right, but she’d already answered. So I translated it for you.”
I took the letter and sat down next to him.
“Something I have been thinking about,” Liv wrote. “Do you remember the pattern of our father’s illness? After the marrow transplant he seemed much better, but in a few months the disease returned. The doctors were surprised by this. One told me that it should not have happened, or at least, not so fast. And then the pattern started. At the dark of the moon, he would sink and the blood count would be very bad. He would start to improve and the blood count at the full moon would be much much better. I thought then that it was only the influence of the lunar energies. But what if it had something to do with Nils? At the full moon, he would not be able to attack. At the dark he would be at his strongest.”
“My god!” I looked up. “If that’s true—”
“Then he’s a murderer, not just a dangerous asshole.” Tor spoke quietly, calmly, but in his voice I heard rage.
“If it’s true, it’s no wonder he won’t talk things out with you.”
“Yeah, you bet. There’s no way we’re going to compromise like good little boys. I wonder if we’ll ever know if he killed Dad or not. Not that I need to know.” He picked up his beer, drank, set the bottle back down. “To deal with him, I mean.”
His smile chilled my blood. I looked down at the rest of the email.
“I have not told Mama all of this,” Liv went on to say. “She is upset enough by what she does know. If she writes you, please guard what you say. She has been having her spells again.”
“Spells?” I said. “Is your mother ill?”
“That’s not the kind of spells Liv means.”
“Sorry. What does she do, what kind of magic, I mean?”
Tor hesitated, considered, finally gave one his shrugs. “She sees visions. When she’s on a roll, she can summon a few of the creatures out of them. Just the smaller ones, like the nisse. Or foxes. I don’t know why, but she has an affinity with foxes.”
“Wait a minute! The nisse here—”
“Was her housewarming present to me, yeah. Right before they left for Iceland.”
I sighed and gave him back the letter. What do you say to a revelation like that? I could think of nothing. Tor sailed the paper back onto the coffee table and sat back on the couch with his bottle of beer in hand.
“What was the runecast like?” I said.
“Interesting. Your theory about Nils wanting the gold is dead-on. Or not the gold itself, but the artifact.”
“You think the writing’s some kind of spell, right?”
“Practically every example of the elder runes that survives is a spell. They weren’t used like the Latin alphabet, y’know, for everyday things.”
“So it’s the spell he wants? Not just the gold?”
“That’s what I’m thinking, yeah. Too bad the runes aren’t an illusion. You could probably read them if they were.”
I heard a challenge in his voice. I ignored it.
“I need to call Cynthia and Brittany,” I said, “to tell them you’re back.”
Tor froze with the beer bottle half-way to his mouth. “They know?” he said.
“Yeah, and Brittany even believes it. I bet Cyn doesn’t, and I bet she hasn’t told Jim.”
“I hope not.” Tor paused for a long swallow of beer. “And I hope no one’s told your brother, either. He’s got enough shit to deal with as it is.”
That night I dreamed about the shutters again. This time I walked through my parents’ apartment, the nice one in San Francisco’s Richmond district that we had before they divorced. I went into my bedroom to look outside, but the shutters covered the window. I woke up fast and lay shivering next to Tor while sunlight brightened on the drapes.
I got up and started the coffee in the kitchen. I’d just poured myself a cup when Roman called me. Even though he stumbled politely around, asking me how I was and how Tor was doing, the shake in his voice told me that he was in trouble. I figured he’d relapsed and gotten himself drugged out. The truth was worse.
“It’s my old dealer,” he told me. “I owe him a lot of money. He’s gonna get violent if I don’t pay up.”
I made a sound half-way between a sigh and a grunt of disgust. “How much do you owe him?”
“Way too much for me to cover. Look, Sis, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hit you up. I know Thorlaksson’s got money, but shit, that should be off the table. Begging my sister’s boyfriend for money—I mean, sometimes I see just how fucking low I’ve sunk.”
“Yeah? Then maybe the money’s worth it. How much, Ro?”
“He’s threatened Brit. I told him I’d kill him if he touched her. He just laughed.”
My stomach knotted around a lump of ice. “Ro, please, how much do you need?”
A long silence, followed by a little boy’s voice, “Three hundred bucks.”
“I can cover that. You don’t need to ask Tor.”
It took me a minute to identify the peculiar sound I heard over the phone. Tears. My brother had started to cry, then choked it back. He sniffled. I waited.
“Thanks.” He cleared his throat. “Jesus fucking god, thanks! How soon can you give it to me?”
“Today. But look, I’ve got to tell Tor if I’m going to meet you in the city. I don’t want to go in alone. It’s because of his crazy uncle. And I want to meet you while it’s still light out. Like, right away.”
“Okay, sure. Tell Tor whatever you want. Least I can do is face up to it, huh? The fuck ugly mess I got myself into, I mean.” He took a deep rasping breath. “I’ll call The Man and tell him I’ll have it for him tonight.”
“You do that.”
It was some while after we clicked off that I realized how much things had changed. Two months previously I never could have scraped together three hundred dollars to give him. Thirty would have been a big stretch. The amount Ro needed would put a huge dent in my checking account, but I could give it to him and still eat.
Chapter 15
Since I refused to let Roman know where Tor’s expensive antiques lived, having him come to the house was out of the question. I also didn’t want him carrying three hundred dollars in cash back to San Francisco on public transportation. So I arranged to meet him at a place we remembered from our childhood, a dim sum place way out on Geary Street, a long drive in from Oakland. I chose this respectable neighborhood because low buildings lined the wide streets. In daylight we could see any threa
ts coming from a decent distance away. What with the Russian Orthodox cathedral nearby, and lots of little shops and delis to attract customers, we’d have plenty of people around us at all times. I figured we’d be safe there from Nils or from anyone who saw me hand Roman a wad of cash. I didn’t worry about Roman’s dealer. He’d get his money, and that was all his kind ever wanted.
Before we left, though, Tor cast the rune staves. He disliked what he saw.
“We’re not staying long,” he told me. “Roman damn well better be on time. I want to meet him, give him the money, and get the hell out of there again.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “You should take a jacket.”
“This time of year?”
“It’ll be cold out there. The fog.”
“I’ll put on a flannel shirt.”
I drove Gretel in so Tor could “keep watch” as he called it while we travelled. He sat straight, unmoving, a grim presence in the passenger seat. I concentrated on driving. Travel moved fast on the bridge in the middle of the day, but San Francisco traffic was its usual snarled self. By the time I finally reached Geary and started driving west on the boulevard, Tor had relaxed enough to talk to me.
“I’m not seeing Nils anywhere near the place,” he said. “Good. But stay alert, anyway.”
I did, for all the good it did us. We drove under a chilly gray canopy of fog before we reached the meeting place. Despite the slow-moving snarls of traffic on Geary, Tor’s parking luck held. We found a spot right around the corner from the restaurant. We got out, and he put wards on the car before we walked back. As we turned the corner onto Geary, I saw Roman, standing in front of the restaurant’s pink stucco front. He waved and hurried over to meet us half-way. He and Tor shook hands.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said to me.
“It’s okay.” I reached into my bra and took out the fold of hundred-dollar bills. “Just don’t get into this mess again, will you?”
“You bet.” Roman took the money and shoved it into his jeans pocket without looking at it. “I may be stupid as a fucking mule, but I learn eventually. I—”
Tor yelled and spun toward the street. “Down!” He flung up his hands with a flash of silver light.
Roman grabbed me and followed orders just as I heard the gunshots. We fell together onto the sidewalk with his body covering mine. A nearby woman screamed. Men cursed. Roman jerked and twisted, then swore in agony. I heard more screaming and the sound of shattering glass. Tor knelt down beside me. I could just see him over Roman’s shoulder. I could not understand why Tor would be pulling off his flannel shirt and wadding it up. A trickle of blood ran down Roman’s arm and dripped onto mine. I understood.
“Get free, Maya,” Tor hissed. “Call 911.”
I squirmed out from under my brother’s limp body. Tor was pressing his shirt hard onto the wound on Roman’s back to try to stop the bleeding. Ro had turned a ghastly sort of pale under his olive complexion. He lay so still that I thought him dead. I grabbed my phone from my pocket.
“I’ve already called.” A gray-haired man with tattoos up both arms stepped into my field of vision. “Take off your jacket and put it under his head. He’s in shock. Hypothermia’s next.”
I slipped out of my denim jacket and folded it into a pillow. When I slid it between Roman’s head and the concrete, I could see that he while he’d passed out, he was still breathing. I laid my hand on his cheek. His skin felt cold and clammy. I pushed his sweaty hair away from his eyes. When I looked up, the gray-haired man had stepped back into the crowd of onlookers.
“Good,” Tor said to me. “Now get out of the way. Here comes help.”
I stood up and walked a few steps away from the street. Sirens came screaming toward us from a great distance away, or so it seemed. I heard people talking, but I couldn’t understand a word of it, because they were speaking Chinese. Men came running, swearing, calling out words that I did understand, “What happened? That’s blood! Is he all right?”
I wanted to scream at them and say, no, you stupid bastards! He’s been shot! Instead I leaned up against the wall of a shop and trembled. Out on Geary a man in a long black cassock and an odd cubical hat darted through the six lanes of traffic and fetched up near us. I thought I was imagining him or seeing a figure from the spirit world, until he knelt down next to Tor and began praying in Russian. He was a priest from the nearby cathedral.
With a skid of tires and a blast on an airhorn a fire truck pulled up out in the street. One of the men in the front seat jumped down and ran over to Tor and Roman. “Good job,” he said to Tor, “I’ll take over. The ambulance is on its way.”
The priest continuing praying. Shivering in his T-shirt, Tor got up and joined me at the shop’s wall.
“Okay,” he said. “I should have worn a jacket.”
I slipped my arm around his waist and leaned against him. He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Oh yeah. I deflected his second shot, the one at me. The fucker!”
I watched the firemen hovering over Roman. One kept up the pressure on the wound. A second man was giving Ro oxygen. That means he’s still alive. My heart began to ease off its pounding.
Around Tor and me the onlookers were talking in a murmur of quiet outrage. “Couldn’t be a drive-by, traffic’s too slow, but he had to come from somewhere, I saw something, a guy, an older guy, but it was so fast, where did he go, I didn’t see that, jeez we should get inside somewhere, doesn’t matter now, here are the cops.”
“Nils?” I said to Tor.
“Has to be. I didn’t realize he could leap. Y’know, travel like I can. Bam. Gone. The times he attacked us before, he was in a car. That’s what I was watching for.”
More sirens, more flashing lights and vehicles screeching to a stop—paramedics came rushing over with a stretcher. Tor released me with a gentle pat on the back.
“Go with the ambulance,” he said. “I’ll stay here and deal with the police.”
The paramedics, a tall blond woman and an Asian man, had taken over from the fireman. I knelt down beside them. “I’m his sister,” I said.
The woman looked at my face. “You sure are,” she said. “We’re taking him to the closest ER. We’ve got to get him there fast. You can ride along.”
They got Ro onto the stretcher, face down, and loaded him into the ambulance. The Asian guy hurried around and got into the driver’s seat. As I climbed into the back, I looked over to the sidewalk and saw Tor talking with a uniformed police officer. The crowd around them began to break up. The blonde paramedic shut the doors. The siren started up, the ambulance jerked forward, picked up speed, went tearing through the traffic with blasts of the horn.
“He have any allergies?” the blonde said.
“No.”
She snapped a paper bracelet around his left wrist, then brought out a cuff and dial and took Roman’s blood pressure. I noticed that the blood from his wound had stopped running, though a red stain still spread through the cloth of his heavy khaki shirt. Capillary action, I thought. My mind had become a jumble of disconnected words. I took Ro’s right hand in both of mine. His eyelids moved but didn’t open.
“Your brother a vet?” the paramedic said.
“Yeah. Marines.”
“They’re tough. He’ll pull through. The guy with you, your boyfriend. Must be another vet.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Um.” She nodded and kept her eyes on the dial of the blood pressure unit. “Pretty low.”
I felt no élan misting from my brother. What little he had left must have pulled back inside him, wrapped around his vital organs in a desperate measure to keep him alive. I could take élan, but I had no idea of how to give it. I could only keep rubbing his hand and silently begging him not to die.
“Here we are,” the paramedic said.
The ambulance jerked into a turn and shrieked to a stop. The jumble in my mind grew worse
. The blonde flung open the doors and hopped down. We’d stopped under a carport next to a tall gray concrete building. Glass double doors slid open. Two men came running and unloaded Roman on the stretcher. When I clambered down, the blonde followed. She handed me a clipboard and a pen.
“You need to fill this out,” she said. “About payment.”
I did, as fast as I could. By the time I got into the ER, Roman had disappeared. I saw a warren of hallways, all painted dull yellow, and a sign saying to follow the green line on the floor. I did and reached an open space labeled Admissions. At the front desk a middle-aged white woman with a mouthful of chewing gum looked me over. I realized that dirt smudged my clothes from my fall onto the sidewalk. She moved her gum to the other side of her mouth with her tongue, then handed me another clipboard, festooned with more forms.
“We need payment information,” she said and returned to chewing her cud.
I handed over Tor’s credit card, which improved her mood. After I signed a final form that promised them I’d pick up the bill, she pointed me in the direction I needed to go. I wandered down a brightly-lit hall, found a pale-haired nurse in green scrubs, and told her that I was the shooting victim’s sister.
“He’s being prepped for surgery,” she said and pointed. “Wait here.”
“Here” was a bleak little room with a TV blaring in one corner. On uncomfortable plastic chairs a dark-haired man sat slumped over with his head in his hands. An African-American woman sat a few chairs away and tried to keep a crying toddler quiet. I took a chair and watched the TV because I didn’t know what else to do. Later I had no memory of the show at all. The nurse returned with another clipboard. I filled out more forms, and in return she gave me the credit card back.
“The VA will pick up the bill,” she told me, “if you’re lucky.”
She stomped out as if I’d insulted her. The man raised his head.
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