Raven Magic

by Jennifer Willis

  “You have yet to answer my question,” the siatco huffed in Thor’s face. The creature’s breath smelled surprisingly minty.

  Thor held a hand up to appease him. He was on his feet but still feeling dizzy. Given that he was about eye-level with the siatco’s chest, Thor reminded himself that any physical confrontation would find him eating dirt again, with a serious cranial fracture to boot.

  The siatco was tall and solidly built. Save for his smooth face, hands, and feet, he was covered in a thick, dark brown fur that looked like it might run several layers deep. The bare face was more human-looking than Thor had gauged in the dark, and the creature’s large eyes were sensitive and intelligent.

  “You did quite a number on me.” Thor offered a smile, though it literally pained him to do so. He battled to remain upright and won out against dizziness and nausea. “Could you at least tell me your name? Since you seem to know all about me.”

  Thor punctuated the last few words for Freyr’s benefit. Freyr stepped out from behind the tree, clearing his throat and trying to mask his gratified smirk.

  “Okay, sorry,” Freyr said. “Thor, this is Nanitch. Nanitch, this is the fatuous god of thunder.”

  Thor shot Freyr a sharp glance. “If you weren’t a ghost . . .”

  The grin vanished from Freyr’s face, and Thor immediately regretted his words. “I mean, you know, if we weren’t in the middle of a volatile crisis . . .” Thor stammered.

  Freyr turned away just as another quake shook the ground. Birds took flight and squirrels and chipmunks dashed for cover while Thor struggled to keep his own balance.

  “This! This is what I am talking about!” Nanitch yelled over the roar. “What have you done to upset the Sisters so?”

  “Sisters?” Thor’s mind flashed on the triple goddess of The Morrigan. Badbh was supposed to be moldering underground, but Nemain and Macha were free.

  “The volcanoes,” Freyr said by way of clarification, and Thor breathed an unconscious sigh of relief. Freyr shook his head. “The Three Sisters volcanic mountain peaks. Apparently they’re the ones making this ruckus. They’re pretty pissed.”

  A smaller quake shook the forest, and Thor’s nausea threatened again. He leaned forward and prepared to eject more stomach acid. Nanitch turned to Freyr and pointed at Thor in disgust. “This one does speak English, does he not?”

  “Sure,” Freyr shrugged. “But not as good as you do.”

  With an angry growl, Thor pushed himself upright and took a bold step toward Freyr. “Well!” he roared at the shade, forgetting to be smug about finally getting the chance to correct Freyr’s grammar after centuries of criticism. “Not as well.”

  Thor turned to the siatco. He wasn’t nearly tall enough to shout into Nanitch’s face, but he could try. “I understand your words, but you have yet to make yourself clear.” Thor ran a hand over his beard and grimaced when his palm came away slick with vomit. He wiped his hand on his dirty jeans. “I’m supposed to be on a vision quest. I sweated my butt off in a dark tent. I’ve been beaten by a skinny Indian with a stick. I hallucinated rather unpleasantly on bad mushrooms.” Thor gestured first to Freyr, and then to Nanitch. “I’ve seen a spirit guide, and I’ve found the fabled siatco! As far as I’m concerned, I’m done. Whatever’s going on with a bunch of uppity volcanoes, I have no idea.” He cleared his throat, forcing the stomach acid back down. “But if you want some thunder and lightning, I’m your man.”

  He remembered, again, that he didn’t have his hammer. He didn’t even have his knife anymore. Thor planted his fists on his hips.

  “I mean, under the right circumstances,” Thor added. “Basically, I have no control over those lava factories. I don’t have the first clue what’s going on.”

  “Hardly the first time,” Freyr muttered.

  Nanitch looked down at Thor with an expression of stern disappointment. “The fact that you are running about my forest with a walking spirit and are receiving visits from the Raven spirit leads me to conclude otherwise.”

  Thor’s jaw went slack. Freyr exhaled crossly and strode quickly to the nearest tree.

  “Son of a tik!” Freyr swung a fist at the trunk. His incorporeal arm swished through it.

  Loki moved swiftly through the forest. He kept his left palm open, turned toward the ground. He felt for any disruption in the currents running beneath the forest floor, but he was not normally as sensitive to these things as Freya was, even less so when he was on the move. He was not a hunter like Heimdall, nor did he have a wolf-dog at his side. But Sally’s pendulum called to him; that was one signal he could trace.

  The ravens had abandoned him. It felt inevitable, and he took some comfort in that. He should have known better than to attempt to command them, even through subtle manipulation. They had accomplished their primary objective—the magick of the land had been awakened and trickery was afoot—and so the alliance dissolved. Loki guessed that his partners in deception viewed Sally sparking the romantic interest and jealous rage of the surrounding volcanoes as merely a bonus.

  Loki heard a cacophony of cackling in the branches over his head as the news spread through the forest’s black-feathered network.

  Thor would manage to fend for himself, and Heimdall had found Opal. But Sally would be on her own and vulnerable to the Bachelor.

  So Loki abandoned his camp. It had been early, still morning, but he’d skipped the coffee. He’d scrambled down the rock face. He thought he’d heard Freya shouting his name as he dashed into the forest, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Sally’s signal wasn’t strong, but Loki could make it out. He was heading south and slightly east, though he wasn’t familiar with this forest. Even if he found Sally and could keep her safe, he would then be lost, too. He was fairly certain he couldn’t count on the ravens for assistance.

  The sun was directly overhead, from what Loki could see through the trees. Mid-day on Friday. Sally’s parents wouldn’t know anything was amiss for at least another day or two—or not at all, if Loki could help it.

  He climbed over a fallen tree trunk and knelt down, pausing to press his palm against the soil. The call of Sally’s pendulum was growing stronger. He was closer than he’d thought.

  Moon would have taken circuitous, backtracking routes through the forest with the girls in tow. The ravens had kept to that part of the plan. But that should have put the trekkers no more than five miles from their starting place—at most a two- or three-hour hike out when the misadventure was over. Sally and Opal should have been much farther north, but Loki’s route kept pushing southward—which meant the Bachelor wasn’t wasting any time.

  There was another loud rumble as the ground shook beneath him. A coyote darted into view on his right, and Loki held still as he eyed the creature. Had Raven gotten other trickster spirits involved? Would the Wargs follow? The animal looked around nervously. It froze in place and lowered its head when it spied Loki, but the quaking ground was enough to trigger a new flight response. The coyote turned sharply and raced away. Loki watched it disappear and breathed a sigh of relief. Sometimes a coyote is just a coyote.

  Loki rose slowly to his feet. If the ravens were to be believed—though Loki had no lingering reason to trust them—the Bachelor was conveying Sally to his volcanic lair. Loki didn’t know what specific process was involved in a mountain spirit taking a mortal bride, but he didn’t imagine the Bachelor would delay in committing her to his lava bed. Of all the ways to die, Loki imagined that was a particularly poor one.

  When Loki looked up to track the direction of Sally’s beacon, he saw the glowing red peak of Mt. Bachelor lording over the trees.

  The ground stilled and Loki picked up his pace. As he advanced, he heard other footfalls deeper in the forest and strange calls echoing down from above, but he didn’t pause to investigate. He was fairly sure Sally was out of time.

  The next time Sally awoke, it was full daylight. She was curled up in a ball on the dry grass of a wide clearing. She blinked her eye
s open and squinted against the bright sunshine beating down on her. Slowly, she lifted her head.

  Jonathan’s song still rang in her ears, though he’d long since finished singing. It was like a virus in her brain, his lyrics and melody on infinite loop in her skull. It reminded her of when the middle-school kid across the street was learning to play clarinet—the painful, squeaking screeches of the tortured woodwind brutalizing tunes she’d previously enjoyed. But this was a hundred times worse.

  She sat up and held her head in her hands. Trying to physically shake the music out of her head like the lingering remnants of a bad dream did no good; fighting against it only seemed to make it worse.

  “This is insane!” Sally shouted, trying to drown out the sound in her head, but the song surged to outmatch her own volume. She winced against the tinny ear-worm that vibrated in her bones. “How do I make this go away?”

  A nearby chuckle got her attention. “It is going to work on you now, yes?”

  Sally lifted her head and spotted Jonathan sitting in the grass a short distance away. He was stretched out in the sun, no snow on the ground anywhere around him, his bare chest glistening, almost iridescent. His skin, shimmering in the dark colors of eggplants and beets, was nearly enough to blind Sally.

  “I told you that you would like my song.” His eyes were smoldering charcoal and gray ash as he turned his gaze on her. “It is all about you, and about my adoration. I wanted you to feel it inside, so you could know my devotion.”

  Tears ran from Sally’s eyes as the song redoubled itself, starting and stopping again in multiple layers and discordant keys.

  “Make it stop!” she pleaded. She tried to reach for him, even at the risk of scorching her fingers on his flesh, but he was too far away. Sally’s hands grasped at the dry grass instead and tore brittle yellow stalks and roots from the dusty dirt. She tried to keep her wits about her, but the song swirled inside her skull and dug hot talons into her brain.

  “Please!” Sally screamed.

  Unperturbed, Jonathan lifted his face to the sky and closed his eyes. He looked as serene as a yogi in deep meditation. “In time, you will become the song, my Little Maid. You will give yourself and the music you carry over to my mountain. And then the consummation of our union shall be complete.”

  Sally gritted her teeth and pounded a fist against the ground. “I am not going to marry you!” she shrieked over the cacophony in her head.

  She tried to make sense of how he would have even found her to begin with. Was it her magick? Had Moon sent him? But she couldn’t keep track of her own thoughts under the constant barrage of noise. “I don’t know where you think you’re taking me, but I won’t go. Do you hear me?”

  Jonathan bared his pure-white teeth and laughed.

  Sally tried to catch her breath as the dissonant strains of Jonathan’s song grated against her eye sockets. She panicked as her vision wavered and dimmed. Her senses were shutting down under the overload. She squeezed her eyes closed.

  Think, Sally! Think! she yelled silently over the assault of sound. She called up as many competing thoughts as her headspace could hold, hoping to crowd out Jonathan’s lyrical infection. She tried reciting the runes of the Elder Futhark in order, along with their divinatory meanings and correspondences. The song continued. She mentally listed every tribe of faerie she could recall from her time with Niall in Ireland. She whispered each step of the memorial spell she had worked for Freyr in the woods, and followed that by singing aloud every nursery rhyme she could remember from her childhood.

  Jonathan’s song did not diminish.

  “The more you fight, the more it will pain you.” Jonathan’s voice was smooth, almost liquid. Its promised calm was cool and inviting. “Give yourself to the song, and it will trouble you no more.”

  “I’m. Not. Giving. In!” Sally struggled with each syllable. If someone hard-wired speakers to her cranium and then turned the volume up to eleven on some Japanese death metal, she wouldn’t have noticed. She couldn’t hear her own voice anymore, but she kept shouting against the song.

  “I don’t like you!” she screamed. She wondered if her ears or even her eyes might be bleeding. Blinded by the song and its searing melody, she crawled across the grass toward Jonathan and shouted in what she assumed was his general direction. “I don’t want to be with you! I will not be your bride! I won’t even be your friend. I want you to go away. I want you to leave me alone right now! Stop this! You have to MAKE THIS STOP!”

  “Quiet, now, Little Maid.” Jonathan’s voice was like a soothing whisper in her ear. It was the only thing she could hear above the mad chaos in her head. “Be still. Why do you trouble yourself over this? You have been chosen, above all others, across all time. Why do you fight it when doing so causes you so much pain?”

  “Go choose somebody else!” Sally screamed again. She felt vessels pop in her throat and tasted blood in her mouth, but she still couldn’t hear her own voice. PLEASE! she cried desperately in her mind. Loki! ANYONE! Help me!

  “Come now,” Jonathan whispered to her again. She felt him grasp the shoulders of her sweatshirt and pull her to her feet even as she pounded her temples with her fists to try to knock the music out of her head.

  “Stop this,” Jonathan said. “You will hurt yourself. There is no cause to do yourself harm.”

  He gripped her wrists and pulled her hands roughly away from her head. Sally cried out as his dark skin scorched her flesh.

  “You will tire of this.” He leaned close, and Sally could feel the heat pouring off of him. She tried to pull away but he held her wrists tight, his fingers branding her. Sally couldn’t keep herself from whimpering.

  “Walk with me now, and you will calm yourself.” His voice was still tender but had gained a harder edge. “You will see. Either way, it will all be over soon.”

  “No!” Sally shrieked, her voice shredding her vocal chords. Fresh blood trickled into her throat, and tears and mucus streamed down her face before turning to sticky steam so near to Jonathan. “Leave me alone! I won’t go with you. I don’t want to.”

  “Where would you prefer to go, then?” Another voice cut through the excruciating clamor in Sally’s head.

  She turned to face this new presence and tried to open her eyes to see who it was—a rescuer? Another threat? But her eyelids were effectively glued shut against the roar of Jonathan’s song.

  “Please,” she rasped, the pain of each syllable paling in comparison to the torture of her burnt flesh and the chaotic racket tearing at her brain. “Please help me.”

  She gasped in relief as Jonathan released her wrists. Blind, Sally fell to the ground and pressed her face into the brittle grass. She tried to cover her head with her hands. Beside her arose a fierce battle cry, a banshee’s scream that flooded her body to compete with the pernicious layers of song blasting through her skull.

  She felt Jonathan’s quick footsteps as shallow beats in the ground as he ran past her toward the intruder, but she had no facility to follow what was happening in the world outside her head.

  Howling, Sally rolled onto her side and spat blood into the grass. She pulled her knees close to her chest and curled into a tight ball. Her fingers clawed at her face and scalp, trying to break free of the new intrusion of Jonathan’s war whoops echoing through the thick prison of her head.

  She could feel every heavy footstep and body blow of the fight that was happening only yards away. She was dimly aware of the cries and shouts of threat and frustration, and the deep thuds that shook the ground. But all she could focus on was the escalating pressure inside her skull. Sobbing, she tasted dirt, grass, and snot mix with blood and salty tears in her mouth. Her breath came in spasms as she waited for her bones to shatter and her body to crack open, starting with her skull.

  13

  Nanitch had Thor by the collar of his sweatshirt and was dragging him along as they moved at a brisk pace through the forest. Thor tried to stay on his feet, but he kept tripping over scat
tered branches and his own bootlaces.

  “I can walk on my own, you know!” Thor shouted. The god of thunder was unused to being handled like a rag doll. If he hadn’t still been woozy, he probably would have been incensed over the injury to his pride, especially in front of his possibly undead cousin. As it was, he was more concerned about another round of dry-heaving.

  Freyr had no difficulty keeping up with Nanitch. Thor supposed it had something to do with being a ghost and not having a concussion.

  Nanitch released Thor’s shirt but didn’t halt. “If you think you can keep pace, then do it. If not, we go back to my way.”

  Thor paused to smooth out the front of his sweatshirt, a ploy to distract from the need to catch his breath. He brushed the dirt off the figure of the Portland State University Vikings mascot emblazoned on his front. Thor had been meaning to burn the sweatshirt, but then Bonnie had taken a liking to it. He’d chosen it for this nature trek with the intention of “accidentally” destroying or losing it, but now Victor E. Viking was growing on him. There was something comically endearing about the cartoon warrior’s spunky optimism.

  “Look lively now,” Freyr commented as he passed Thor. “Don’t want to make the sasquatch angry again.”

  Thor fell into step with the partially translucent Vanir. The throbbing knot in his head had diminished to a dull ache. Every dozen meters or so, he could have sworn that Freyr was looking more solid, but then he grew wispy and tenuous again.

  “Can we talk about this?” Thor asked in a voice loud enough for Nanitch to hear. “I’d at least like to know where I’m going and why.”

  Nanitch glared over one burly shoulder but kept moving forward through the trees. He brushed aside heavy branches like so much crêpe paper. “Agitated volcano spirits are no trifling matter. Speed is of the essence if we are to remedy this situation without further incident.”