Raven Magic

by Jennifer Willis

  Thor looked upstream. He saw the outline of South Sister, the biggest of the three sibling volcanoes that stood in what passed for a tight cluster on a geological scale. He couldn’t remember what they were called. Faith? Purity? Chastity? Bonnie’s grandmother would probably call them something else. The wedge of the peak he could see was covered in its usual, year-round snow. It didn’t look any more threatening than usual, so he wasn’t sure what Freyr was talking about.

  He turned downstream toward Mt. Bachelor, most of it obscured by the trees. Bonnie liked to go skiing there. He smiled at the memory of a cozy weekend in a rented cabin the previous winter and their long, chilly detour through the Painted Hills before heading back to Portland.

  Thor scratched the back of his neck. Maybe he did have a clue about where he was after all.

  “I don’t see anything amiss, cousin. Maybe being dead is messing with your sense of things.” Thor leaned forward to scoop up more water to drink. As he dipped his hands into the brook, a black feather came floating downstream and settled into his grasp. Thor snatched it up.

  “Raven feather,” he muttered, turning it in the light. It could have been an omen, but he wasn’t sure if it was bad or good. “What do you think?”

  Freyr reached for the feather, but his hand passed through it as though he were made of smoke. Frustration darkened the nature god’s face. Moving more slowly, he tried again to grasp the feather but had the same result. This time, however, his eyes widened. “Sally is working magick in these woods?”

  Thor shrugged. “She’s on some trek of her own, with that witchy friend of hers. Learning about plants.” He hadn’t paid much attention to Sally and Opal’s preparations. He’d had enough to worry about with his impending wedding and the siatco he was supposed to wrestle. He began to wonder if Rod was right—maybe Bonnie’s grandmother was just messing with him.

  Freyr shook his head. “That feather is telling me something.”

  Thor held the feather out to Freyr, and his cousin held his hand over it. Freyr closed his eyes and frowned, then took in a sharp breath. His eyes flashed open.

  “We’ve got to go.” Freyr rose to his feet and glanced at Thor with impatience. “I’m not kidding around.”

  “What’s going on?” Thor got up slowly, fighting the urge to hack up more stomach acid. He looked at the feather in his hands and tried to see what Freyr had divined from it. “What’s wrong?”

  “Bachelor,” Freyr said. “The volcano is after Sally.”

  Thor glanced downstream again at Mt. Bachelor, which had certainly not moved. He had no idea how a volcano could go after a human being without throwing some kind of lava tantrum, but Freyr seemed convinced of the threat. That was enough for Thor.

  Letting the feather fall to the ground, Thor shoved his feet into his socks and laced up his boots. Standing was an unsteady enterprise after his trippy episode, but he managed it by crawling across the dirt and using a tree to pull himself up. He nodded to Freyr that he was ready, just before a trio of men looking completely incongruous with their field bags, safari clothing, and media equipment trampled out of the woods and shoved a microphone in Thor’s face.

  “Have you spotted anything unusual in the woods today?” the youngest and skinniest of the men demanded. The kid was tall and had a face badly scarred by acne. A second, shorter fellow with a neatly trimmed beard framed a camera on Thor.

  Thor blinked. “What?”

  “Bigfoot,” said the third man, much older than the other two. He was dressed entirely in Army surplus camouflage save for his designer sunglasses and high-end iWatch, making him look like some kind of Country Club Sandinista. “We’re looking for Bigfoot.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Thor shook his head and looked at Freyr. “They know about the siatco.”

  Freyr lifted a warning finger to his lips, and Thor quietly cursed himself.

  The older man pushed himself forward. His face was animated and eager, the kind of expression Thor had often seen on untested youth heading into their first battle. It looked almost comical on a man who had to be in his sixties and whose olive-and-brown cargo pants were tucked neatly into a brand new pair of Doc Martins. “You know about the siatco?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Thor made his voice as gruff as possible and tried to push past the trio, but the graying man in the ridiculous outfit grabbed Thor by the elbow even though Thor outweighed him twice over.

  “Have you seen it?!” the man commanded. “Why else would you be all the way out here by yourself?”

  Thor thought briefly about explaining his predicament—a Norse immortal who wanted to marry a nice half-Italian, half-Indian lady, who’d just had a really bad magic mushroom trip, and who was being visited by the ghost of the heir to the Vanir throne in Ireland—but he was pretty sure they wouldn’t understand. And, anyway, a video record of such a statement would not go over well with Odin.

  “Puking my guts out,” Thor replied. “That’s what I’m doing out here. So, you know, watch your step.”

  He freed himself from the man’s grasp and stepped away. When the man grabbed for him again, Thor pushed him away without looking back. He smiled at the sound of splashing water and angry curses.

  9

  Loki sat on the rocky surface of the outcropping that served as his base. He hadn’t moved much from the spot since his arrival Tuesday night. The god of chaos was a surprisingly patient being; he’d had centuries of practice in watching and waiting, and he had an unparalleled capacity for being amused by just about everything he saw.

  The first night, he’d set himself up beneath the summer stars and smiled up at the constellation Scorpius. Far from the pollution of city lights, the heavens still put on a spectacular show. Scorpius wasn’t part of the Norse pantheon, but Loki understood the mythical creature’s nature—there was no point fighting against what one had been created to be.

  Before dawn Wednesday morning, Tim Wallulatum had already been busy setting up the sweat lodge. Loki watched as the Indian—twenty-five-percent Warm Springs Indian, to be exact; the rest was European blood from successive colonial and immigrant waves—assembled the crooked branches into a domed lattice structure. Tim was too far away for his song to carry to Loki’s ears, but Loki watched through his binoculars and imagined he could hear Tim humming to himself as he worked.

  After the dome’s structure was complete, Tim went to work placing layer upon layer of dried deerskins atop the wood and sinew skeleton. It had taken hours, but Loki never saw Tim take a break other than to stir the fire that heated the rocks for the sweat. Tim’s concentration was enviable.

  Loki was more interested in Sally, of course. He’d felt a flutter of avuncular affection when her parents pulled up in their SUV. He was genuinely grateful to them for giving Sally shelter and love, even if they had no real appreciation of who or what she was. But they’d played their parts well enough. He watched them kiss their daughter and hug her friend and say goodbye. It was supposed to be just a few days in the woods.

  Now it was Thursday, late morning. Loki poured himself a cup of coffee from the French press he’d brought along. There was more water coming to a boil in the tin kettle atop his tiny camp stove. He was sufficiently supplied for the duration of this particular project.

  He took a sip of coffee—black, a local blend—and smiled at Freya through his binoculars. Rod had entered the woods with the old woman the night before—an unexpected turn, but one that pleased Loki. Frigga’s handyman deserved an adventure of his own, and Loki congratulated himself on providing the opportunity.

  That left Freya alone at her campsite. At magnification, he could see the self-recrimination in her shoulders, the tight way she held her neck and head, the clench of her hands. On her own, she couldn’t sublimate her guilt by starting arguments about who should be on watch or which direction the tent should face. Loki couldn’t hear her at this distance, but if she muttered to herself it wouldn’t be difficult to ima
gine the edge in her voice.

  A raven’s cry came from somewhere below, and Loki frowned. His partners hadn’t been behaving as expected, but he couldn’t fault them for that. They were all of them tricksters; sticking to a plan had never been a strong suit, not even for Loki. But wasn’t that the fun of it? Sitting back and waiting to see what might happen? The twists and turns were positively delightful: surprise players arriving on the scene, spur-of-the-moment decisions by parties on all sides, and no take-backs. This interim confusion was what Loki relished, even if he always did know the end result, more or less, far in advance.

  This time it was the mountains who most surprised him. He’d felt the rumbling ground. When the volcano spirits decided to get involved, all bets were off—wasn’t that how the expression went?

  It looked to be creeping toward noon, if the sun overhead could be trusted. Thor would be primed for another blustering tantrum about now. Sally had been in the woods for twenty-four hours and had apparently made good use of that time; Loki could feel the shift in the land. He took another sip of hot coffee and smiled.

  Several of the previous Rune Witches had gotten on his nerves. Others he’d simply ignored. None of them had been of particular use to him and they’d kept their distance besides, having been trained by Frigga to be wary of Wargs. And rightly so. Managarm and Fenrir both had shown Sally what a Warg could do. She’d seen a deeper and more complex side to their kind than any Rune Witch before her.

  It also hadn’t hurt that it was Loki himself, legendary Warg progenitor, who had come to Sally’s aid and delivered her to Odin and Frigga. The right act of diplomacy at the right time, perhaps.

  Sally trusted him, even when the others didn’t. He shared secrets with her—little confidences, here and there, nothing Cosmos-shattering. And she listened. She’d even sought his advice and asked for his help.

  She might not appreciate the fact for a long time to come, but in this quest Loki had given her precisely what she had longed for. Her magick was powerful, and she was strong-willed and stubborn. But she remained untested. At least, she hadn’t been through the fire in a way that would have satisfied Odin in the old days. She still had much to learn about herself and about the world. So much yet to understand about the so-called gods she had first worshipped and then come to work alongside.

  Quite a bit she didn’t know about Loki, too. It was high time for Sally to discover what she was made of.

  “Be careful what you wish for, Little Witch,” Loki muttered, using the nickname she detested. “Your wicked uncle might just grant it.”

  Loki knocked back the rest of his cooling coffee and reached for the boiling kettle on the propane stove. This was going to be fine entertainment indeed.

  Heimdall walked the perimeter of the abandoned ritual circle. Several of the runes inscribed in the dirt were smudged by animal tracks, but the rest seemed to be intact. The center was a mess of black ash.

  “What do you make of this?” he asked.

  Opal knelt by the burnt-down stub of a white candle. She dug up the bit of wax and sniffed at it.

  “Well, obviously this is Sally’s work.” She dropped the spent candle onto the ground. “At least, I can’t imagine who else would have set up something like this in the forest right about now.”

  Both Laika and Fenrir had their noses to the ground and were sniffing along the clearing’s perimeter. Fenrir looked particularly ridiculous in his bipedal form, snuffling around on his hands and knees. His stump of a tail was twitching. Heimdall tried not to stare.

  “Anything?” Heimdall asked.

  Laika kept to her work, but Fenrir lifted his head. “There are many confusing scents here.” He gestured toward the ritual space with the black claws of one hair-covered hand. “Whatever the Rune Witch used in her spell isn’t helping.”

  Opal leaned over the circle. “She would have used sigils,” she said. “I can’t tell you which ones or what they’re for. Sally is always making up her own sigils, you know, weaving the rune symbols together for an immediate purpose.” Opal pulled at her hair to tighten her long ponytail. “She’s always been so much better with the runes than me.”

  Heimdall looked up at the sky. The sun was on its descent, the shadows growing longer by the minute. He glanced at Laika and noticed how she kept a close eye on the Fenris Wolf while doing her own investigating. They’d spent a full day following Fenrir’s lead. He hoped it wouldn’t prove to be a fatal mistake.

  “Hang on a second.” Opal crawled into the circle and started digging into the soil with her fingers. After moving a sizable mound of ash and dirt out of the way, she pulled the burnt stub of a black-and-white candle out of the ground. She brushed off the dirt and frowned at the swirled colors and plant material bound in the wax.

  “This is new.” Opal held the candle to her nose. “Sandalwood. Sage, definitely. Maybe a bit of rose. And . . .” Her eyes widened. “Frankincense?”

  Opal backed out of the circle and scrambled toward her backpack, leaning against a tree just outside the clearing. She pulled out her leather-bound Book of Shadows, then sat in the dirt and leafed speedily through the handwritten pages. She settled on a long list of herbal correspondences and ran her finger down one page after the next until she found what she was looking for. She tightened her grip on the journal as she read. “Oh, gee.” Opal looked up at Heimdall.

  He lifted his eyebrows and waited.

  “Um, it’s just that this may not have been any ordinary spell,” she said.

  Heimdall pinched the bridge of his nose. Nothing was ever an “ordinary spell” where Sally was concerned. She was smart, stubborn, and powerful—a dangerous combination in any teenager, but volatile where Norse magick was concerned.

  His temples started to throb. Had the Rune Witch been so reckless—or clueless—as to perform another one of her complicated rituals when she was alone and so far from guidance? But maybe the isolation had been the point, to prevent any blowback from impacting innocent bystanders. Maybe she wasn’t incapable of learning.

  Or maybe Moon had connived to keep Sally and her magick secluded and out of reach.

  “It looks like, um . . .” Opal read over her notes again. “Sally was maybe working with funerary forces?”

  Funerary forces? The questioning tone of Opal’s voice meant she was afraid to come right out and say it. Heimdall stepped toward Opal and stood over her. “Tell me.”

  Opal shook her head. “I really can’t be sure.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Using her finger as a bookmark, Opal closed her journal. “Okay, so the combination of herbs, and some of the runes I could make out from the smudged sigils . . .” Opal swallowed hard but managed to meet Heimdall’s eye. “She was working with forces of the dead.”

  Heimdall’s lips tightened into a straight line. He looked into the trees over Opal’s head. Freyr.

  Opal lay down her book and rose to her feet. “But that makes sense for a memorial, you know. Because she said she wanted to do something for Freyr. She took that all pretty hard, even if she didn’t talk about it. This could have been something designed to bring comfort to those left behind.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “It’s just that some of this looks more . . . involved. On a different level.” Opal’s shoulders sagged. “Like I said, I can’t be sure.”

  For the moment, Heimdall didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on what Sally’s magickal intentions may or may not have been. It was his responsibility to find her. If there was any supernatural mess to be cleaned up, he’d let Freya deal with it.

  Opal pursed her lips. “Do you think Moon pushed Sally in a direction she hadn’t planned?”

  Heimdall sighed. He had learned from weary experience that anything was possible. He feared this was Managarm all over again. It wasn’t a careless leap to imagine that Moon had an inkling about Sally’s capabilities, and that she might have compelled the Rune Witch to perform an altered version of the ritual she
had planned. He couldn’t see enough of the pieces to make the puzzle fit together.

  Fenrir approached the ritual space. He looked at the outer perimeter of runes, then stepped inside and lowered himself to his knees. He sniffed at the ground and froze when he reached the center of the circle.

  “Her blood is here.” Fenrir’s eyes showed a hint of fear, and that was enough to spark Heimdall’s adrenaline again. He worked at keeping his breath steady and even.

  But Opal gasped, giving easily into dismay. Heimdall was about to say something to keep everyone calm and focused when Laika let loose a loud howl at the far side of the clearing. When she caught Heimdall’s eye, the wolf-dog gestured with her snout toward the woods beyond.

  “You’ve got Sally?” asked Heimdall.

  Laika opened her mouth in a smiling pant. She took a few steps in the direction of the new scent trail and waited for Heimdall and the others to follow.

  “Grab your things,” Heimdall said to Opal. He glanced at Fenrir, still kneeling on the ground, “We’re going.”

  Fenrir nodded and rose to his feet, then shifted into the great black wolf before he’d reached the other side of the clearing. Startled, Laika stamped her feet in place and whined at his approach. Fenrir slowed his gait and dropped into a play-bow to show her that he posed no threat.

  Laika whined again and backed away from him, but Fenrir ducked his head lower still. Then he nudged Laika’s ear and licked the side of her face before rolling onto his back to expose his belly. Laika’s nose twitched as she sniffed at him, then her mouth fell open into a smile as she rolled her neck over his face, rubbing their scents on each other.

  Heimdall stared at them, dumbstruck. Fenrir making friends with his wolf-dog? Fenrir making friends, period? Heimdall wasn’t quite sure what this might portend. He really hoped they weren’t making a love connection.