Bonnie rested her knife on the cutting board beside a mountain of chopped cabbage and made a move to leave the kitchen, but Thor rose from the table and beat her to the doorway.
“I’ve got it.” He patted her shoulder and headed for the door.
The doorbell rang again—an odd mix of Norse pipes and wailing horns, thanks to a surprise installation by Freya and Rod. Thor swung open the heavy door and found Carol Tilson standing on the front porch. He took a breath and then put on her best smile.
“Oh, Thor!” Carol started with a sing-song greeting that was simultaneously joyful and slightly oppressive. “I’m so glad to catch you at home. I just had to come ask you a question. Do you have just a minute?”
Thor knew Carol would require significantly more than just a minute. An hour was more likely when she made such a request. But he stepped out onto the porch anyway, leaving the front door ajar. Carol was a good neighbor, someone who was always upbeat and looking for the good in everyone and everything. That she had a tendency to ramble and dig for deeper meaning where there really was none to be found was annoying but ultimately not harmful.
“What can I do for you, Carol?” Thor asked pleasantly. He then thought to lean through the doorway into the house. “Carol’s here!” he called out, just in case he needed reinforcements.
“Well,” Carol breathed more than spoke. “I was in my backyard gardening, you know, getting the yard ready for the coming spring. There’s so much work to be done! You wouldn’t believe how much mulch you need to cover a single vegetable bed. But, Thor! You know those leaves you raked up and saved for me last fall? They have done just the best job at sheltering the carrots and kale I’ve been growing over the winter.”
Carol’s face was alive with a naïve wonderment that would have been out of place on anyone else her age. From her earlier monologues about her children and grandchildren, Thor figured Carol was in her mid-to-late sixties and she was still very active in her front and back gardens and with backpacking and whitewater rafting trips. With her graying hair peeking out from beneath a wide-brimmed canvas hat, her flannel shirt and fleece vest, and a pair of dirty gardening gloves hanging out of her blue jeans pocket, Carol wore the standard uniform of a crunchy Pacific Northwest retiree.
“It’s really just astonishing how much you can do with what’s immediately available to you.” Eyes wide with the marvels of nature, she touched his arm lightly to drive her point home. “You really don’t have to go out and buy all the fancy equipment or supplies you see advertised everywhere, and of course you have the advantage of avoiding all those added chemicals, too.” Her face soured, and for a moment Thor thought Carol was going to cry. “It’s just such a tragedy what the world is coming to, with all the modified foods that are flooding the market, and the way even our modern fertilizers and pesticides are altering the pH of the soil of our own yards, right beneath our very feet! Our homes!”
“Uh, you said you were gardening?” Thor smiled and nodded and tried to bring Carol back around to what he guessed was her original point.
“Oh, yes!” Carol’s voice brightened with new enthusiasm and she pushed her lightweight glasses further up her nose. “I was just amending my raised beds with mushroom compost, bone meal, and lime, in preparation for the year’s first planting, you know, and getting a head start on trimming back a few of the arborvitae, because you really do need to keep an eye on them. They’re so tall and beautiful, but they’ll get away from you if you let them. And that’s when I heard Magnus in the yard playing with his new friend.”
Carol paused. Thor waited, not knowing if he was expected to contribute something to the conversation, or if Carol was simply collecting her thoughts.
“Yes, Magnus has a new friend. He’s just . . .” Thor wasn’t quite sure what to say about Maksim’s appearance. Probably the less, the better. “He just arrived today.”
“Well,” Carol exhaled, making the syllable sound like more an exclamation of relief than a conversational crutch. “They sounded like they were just having the best time! I know it’s been hard on little Magnus, and I’ve been so worried about him, in my own way. He’s such a special child.”
“Umm, yes?” Thor shifted his weight between his feet and crossed his arms over his chest. It was cold outside on the porch, and the heat was escaping from the house through the open door. The skies had grown even darker, and Thor’s stomach tightened when he thought of his sandwich sitting untouched on the kitchen table. He wondered how late he could be coming back to work from lunch, even if he was the boss.
Carol clapped her hands together in delight. “It was such a blessing when you moved into this neighborhood, into Bonnie’s house, and now with your young family. I remember when there were children all up and down this street, riding their bikes, building forts in the trees, setting up lemonade stands in the summer. My own children included. It was a completely different atmosphere. But that was years ago. They all grew up and moved away, and now we’re just a bunch of empty nesters.”
Carol sighed and looked almost forlorn. Thor wasn’t sure if he should place a comforting hand on the senior woman’s thin shoulder, or wait for her to come roaring back with some optimistic point to her story.
“But that’s all changed now!” Carol’s face lit up with a smile.
So, option number two.
“It’s so wonderful to hear the laughter of children again, and right next door!” Carol grasped Thor’s shoulders, and he was surprised by the strength of her grip. “I simply wanted you to know what absolute joy that brought me, to hear them in the yard. I didn’t want you to worry that they were being too loud or disruptive for this old woman. Some people might not take so kindly to the antics and energy of young people, but you just can’t please everyone.”
She glanced over her shoulder and narrowed her eyes at a house across the street. The curtains in the window quickly fell together as the older man in residence stepped back into the shadows.
“No, you certainly can’t,” Thor said now that Carol finally took a breath. “You know I need to get back to my sandwich—”
“So do you need anything? For the boys? I mean, to make things more comfortable.” Carol stressed the last word in such a way that made Thor frown. Then the corners of his mouth tugged down into a flat-out scowl when he saw a pair of strange men mounting the steps to the porch.
They were maybe in their mid-thirties, dressed in street clothes, and they hadn’t shaved recently. They could have passed for Portland hipster-wannabes, but something about the men made Thor instantly uneasy.
Carol looked the men up and down, then leaned in close to Thor.
“Anything you need,” she whispered as she gave him a meaningful look. “I’m right here.”
Thor nodded. “Right next door.”
Carol squeezed his elbow. “Right here.”
Thor wanted to ask Carol what she meant, but the two men were already at the top of the stairs and gauging them with suspicious eyes. The men’s faces were grim and determined.
“You live here?” the shorter of the two men asked. His accent was thick, and Thor tried to gauge his origins from his dark hair and eyes and the olive tint to his skin. He wasn’t good with placing accents, not the way Bragi had been. His first thought was Middle Eastern, but then he chided himself for being racist—no matter what the television dramas and internet alarmists kept spewing, not all bad guys were Arab, or Persian, or whatever. Then he thought the man looked a little like Bonnie—not enough to be kin, but possibly from a similar heritage. So Thor went with the assumption that the man was Italian or Greek or whatever the country names were in the region these days.
“You live here?” the man asked again, his black eyebrows raised with impatience. He didn’t seem the least intimidated by Thor’s dark scowling or his meaty girth, and that alone was enough to get the thunderer’s hackles up.
“Can we help you with something?” Carol casually slipped the dirty gardening gloves out of her pocke
t and slapped them into one of her palms. Thor looked at his neighbor with new respect. Had she just threatened these men?
“We look for a boy,” the man replied, deliberately not making eye contact with Carol. The taller man stepped forward and pulled a photo out of his jacket pocket.
“This boy.” The short man gestured toward the photo. It was a ratty thing, creased down the middle and fraying at the corners. The image itself was faded and out-of-focus, but Thor didn’t need to take a closer look at it to know that the boy pictured on the woman’s lap was Maksim.
“That’s not a very good photo.” Thor tried not to smirk. He knew he should consult with Bonnie. Maksim had appeared on their doorstep, and now these men had come looking for him only hours later. It would be easy to hand the boy over to them and go back to their lives. But something about these guys on his porch made his skin itch. “It seems like if you were family or something, you’d have a better picture of him.”
Shortie grabbed the photo from his taller friend and practically shoved it in Thor’s face. “You have seen him?”
Thor turned away from the photo but refused to step back. “I didn’t say that.”
“And you did not say that you did not see him,” the taller man said.
Thor sniffed hard and stretched his fingers, a subtle message that he was gearing up to pound some heads. The interlopers again didn’t seem the least cowed. They had a photo of Maksim, but there was no true anguish or worry that Thor could see in the men’s faces. Their arrival was too quick, too convenient. Thor decided he wanted to ask some questions of his own.
He lifted his fists and opened his mouth, but Carol stepped in front of him.
“What precisely is your business with this boy?” Carol’s voice was strong and solid, nothing like her usual breathy astonishment. “You’re obviously not with the police or any other authority.”
“My nephew.” Shortie withdrew the photo and passed it back to his friend, exposing a dark red spiral tattoo on his neck. He turned back and glared past Carol at Thor. “Missing.”
“I don’t know why you think you would find him here,” Thor said. It wasn’t a lie.
The man shrugged and forced a tight smile. “We go from one house to the next, looking for the boy.”
Thor forced his own smile in return. The men hadn’t visited any other house on this block, but had come directly to Thor’s door. And he was pretty sure Shortie knew he’d been caught out.
“Where did you last see him?” Carol asked. “How long has he been missing? Have you gone to the police? How old is he? What’s his name?”
Thor almost laughed. Carol also knew something wasn’t quite right with these two—Sicilian? Albanian?—men on the porch, and for the moment he was glad for her interference.
“Maksim,” the taller man said. “The name of the boy. You have seen him?”
Carol cleared her throat and looked down at her gardening gloves. “Well, I certainly haven’t seen him, and I don’t know why you would think you would find him here. This neighborhood is full of old people, other than the two boys who live here.” She glanced at Thor. “And your family has been here for how long? A year?”
“A year and a half.” Thor gave Carol a grateful smile.
“You say you do not know this boy,” Shortie said. It wasn’t a question.
“I think you should leave now,” Carol replied. Thor’s smile widened.
“He was wearing an old basketball jersey. The Trailblazers.“ Shortie pointedly ignored Carol and looked past her at Thor. “If you see this boy, you tell me, yes?”
“He has a birthmark,” the taller man said. He was already descending the stairs to the sidewalk and tugging at his friend’s elbow to follow. “Like the crescent moon, on his left shoulder.”
Shortie jostled away from his friend to reach past Carol and hold out a worn business card to Thor. Carol snatched it away from him.
“If we were to find a lost boy on this or any other street, our first call would be to the police, or to child services.” Carol lifted the card and waved it in the man’s face. “But we do have your contact information, just in case.”
Shortie flashed another fake smile and backed away. “That is all we ask. This is a very important boy. My sister, she is very upset at his absence.”
The men crossed the short stretch of concrete leading away from the house, then Shortie paused at the gate that led to the street. He glanced back at Thor. “It would be a mistake to hide this boy. Only trouble follows him.”
Thor felt Carol grip his elbow as they watched the men walk away. They did not move on to the next house or approach any other home in the neighborhood. Instead, they walked down the middle of the street while one of them pulled out a mobile phone.
Carol turned to Thor and whispered in a fierce tone he’d never heard from her before. “That little boy is safe here. We’ll see to it that he stays that way.”
She slipped the man’s card into Thor’s palm and then was on her way down the stairs and toward the gate. She paused before turning to her own house. “Anything you need. I mean it.”
She pulled on her gardening gloves, adjusted her hat, and went home. Thor watched until she was safely inside her own house, then leaned out to peer farther down the street. A dark van with gold lettering met the two interlopers at the end of the block. They pulled open a sliding door to reveal a third man inside, and he appeared quite agitated. There was a lot of gesticulating and shouting in a language Thor didn’t understand before everyone loaded in and the vehicle drove away.
Thor stood in silence on the porch. He ran his fingers over the rough edges of the business card and noticed how his breath froze on the air. The temperature had dropped again, and a few stray snowflakes drifted lazily toward the ground. He was still letting all the warm air out of the house.
He shoved the card into his pocket without looking at it and went back inside the house. When he sat back down at the table, his sandwich was two-thirds gone and what was left was riddled with child-sized bite marks. Maksim and Magnus looked across the table at each other and giggled into their tall mugs of hot chocolate.
3
Sally pulled the hood of her jacket up over her head against the February rain giving way to wet snow. Getting drenched when she was alone on her witchy activities was fine, but she didn’t like being soggy in public. Fenrir walked beside her, unperturbed by the weather.
Makes sense, she thought. He’s used to living wild in the woods.
With a sideways glance, she saw the unrelenting, serene smile she’d only recently come to associate with the Randulfr. In their previous encounters, even when he was saving her life, Fenrir had been a fierce and single-minded creature who made even Thor and Heimdall uneasy. Gradually, though, Sally had begun to let her guard down around him, and she’d been rewarded by a surprisingly comfortable friendship.
His hands swung freely at his sides as he took long strides to keep up with her. He was only about five-feet tall, and Sally had grown a few inches since their first meeting when she was sixteen. He caught her eyeing him, and his smile broadened. For the first time, Sally saw the resemblance to Loki.
She grew suddenly cold, and she shivered inside her rain jacket.
If Fenrir noticed her discomfort, he didn’t let on. He led her to the restaurant he’d chosen. The Two Ravens Rathskeller was a new basement tavern in Portland’s Old Town district striving for an English-Irish-Scandi fusion vibe. Saga had flatly refused to set foot in the place when she read about their opening online, though she admitted the meatballs and chips she’d ordered for delivery weren’t bad.
Fenrir hurried a few steps ahead and held the door open for her. Sally gave him an awkward smile as she pushed her wet hood back from her face and stepped inside.
“So, you’ve been here before?” Sally asked as they were seated in a tall booth near the kitchen. She looked around at the posh design of the place—clean lines and polished wood, accented by lots of leather upholstery
and snug-looking mini fireplaces.
Fenrir rested his hands on the menu on the wooden table and smiled at her. “Nah, just thought you’d like it. You needed a break.”
Sally blew out a long breath and rested back against the cushioned bench. “It seems like I always need a break.” Her forced laugh sounded almost as hollow as it felt.
“So, relax.” Fenrir glanced at the menu, perusing all four laminated pages in a matter of seconds, and then signaled to the waitress. “You know what you want?”
Sally blinked. The smells of hearty stews and fried foods wafted from the kitchen. She didn’t need to look at the menu. The waitress turned to her with her pen poised over her pad.
“Anything hot and hearty with chips, please,” Sally said.
Fenrir made pleasant small talk while the waitress brought their glasses of water and mugs of coffee. Sally studied his movements while he spoke—the way his gloved hands fidgeted with the fit of his cap or the zipper of his hooded sweatshirt, how he scanned the room every other minute as though on the watch for danger. Despite his advice, Sally was finding it difficult to relax in his presence when he was obviously keyed up himself.
When the food arrived, Sally dug into her potted shrimp and plate of chunky golden fries. “Why don’t you just tell me what this is all about?”
Fenrir feigned patience as the waitress set a rare hanger steak and a nearly raw hamburger down before him, then he waited until the woman was out of sight before he picked up the burger and consumed it in four large bites.
Sally watched him lick the tips of his fingers—rather, the dark leather covering his black claws—and wondered if he had given himself a manicure to keep from shredding his gloves. She swirled a thick wedge of fried potato in a cup of spicy ketchup and surveyed his clothing. Beneath his zippered hoodie, his shirt was buttoned all the way to the top and he kept the cuffs of his long sleeves pulled over the tops of his gloves. Other than his face, which he’d obviously shaved, not an inch of the Randulfr’s body was uncovered. He’d disguised his nature well.
Twilight Magic (Rune Witch Book 6) Page 4