Twilight Magic (Rune Witch Book 6)

by Jennifer Willis

  “Well, well!” Thor announced with arms spread wide. “What have we discovered?”

  Two Valkyrie bikers in blue jeans, heavy boots, and leather jackets and gloves came in behind Thor and made their way directly toward the kitchen. Sally was astonished that anyone could maintain an appetite while Opal’s fate remained in limbo.

  “Freyr?” Thor stomped toward the ghostly shade of the Vanir hovering by the fire. “I told you he’d be back! Freyr always comes back again.”

  “Yeah, about that . . .” Freyr began. Thor tried to sweep Freyr up into a bear hug but his arms swooshed right through him.

  “What’s this? Are you a ghost again? What do we have to do to get some flesh on those spectral bones?” Thor laughed, but Freyr didn’t crack a smile.

  “Man, I just don’t know,” Freyr said. “We’ll figure it out later. I’m not sure how much time I have. I can’t even tell you how I know what I know. I was standing in Thor and Bonnie’s living room, and then zap! I was floating free in a shimmering web of . . . I don’t even know what.”

  Freya opened her mouth, probably to fill in the details of what her brother must have experienced, but he held up a hand to ask for her silence. She closed her mouth.

  “I guess I got tied to Utra somehow, because she was close by and in a similar transitional state? So I’ve been watching her and trying to find out what I could.” Freyr faded to almost nothingness but then his form surged back again and became almost corporeal for a moment. He looked visibly nauseated as his presence finally settled somewhere in between solid and nonexistent. “Okay, that was not my favorite thing.”

  Sally grabbed her jacket off the leather settee and pulled her bag of Yggdrasil runes out of the pocket. She fished around inside the bag until she found the rounded piece of wood she wanted, and then laid it face up at Freyr’s feet. He looked down at Eihwaz, the rune of stability and strength.

  “It should help.” She touched the rune again and sent a shock of her own power into the symbol—not so much chaos to scatter Freyr’s shade to the winds, but enough to disrupt whatever process was trying to pull him out of phase and away from the Lodge. Enough to tie him, temporarily, to the Yggdrasil outside.

  She stood and looked him in the eye. She’d never seen him so spooked. “Say what you need to say.”

  “Utra’s inside Opal’s body, but I think you already know that.” Freyr didn’t budge from his spot by the hearth, and Sally wondered if she’d anchored him too firmly. “If you kill Utra, you kill Opal.”

  Sally retreated to a free spot on one of the couches. She sat next to Rod and wished she could bury herself inside her jacket. She didn’t know anything about spirit possession—if that was even what they were dealing with. Did Opal have any chance at getting back into her own body? Opal had both magickal ability and training, but she was no immortal. Her body, regardless of who was at the helm, was more vulnerable and Sally had no idea how to fix this without hurting her friend. And Utra was headed to the Lodge for the apples.

  Maggie leapt to her feet. “This is it. This is the battle for immortality and magick and all the marbles, right? Because it’s not just Utra. It’s her mortal followers wanting to make gods of themselves.”

  “Suleiman’s Spiral,” Freyr said. “That’s what they’re calling themselves.”

  “So this Suleiman, he’s their leader?” Thor offered Freyr a box of Cheez-Its, then seemed to remember that ghosts don’t eat. He popped a few bright orange crackers into his own mouth.

  “No, there’s no Suleiman on the scene, from what I saw. Near as I can tell, they just liked the name.”

  “Well, I think it sounds stupid,” Thor said. “Taking themselves too seriously.”

  Bitter laughter burst from Sally’s lips. “Of course they do. That’s what people do when they start meddling. Don’t you remember what I was like? So high and mighty and convinced I was making the world a better place? That only I had the power and the vision to make that happen?”

  Zach wandered in from the hallway and leaned against the wall. He crossed his arms and looked at Sally, his eyes tired and sad. She had been such an idiot for so many years, first thinking she could save the world on her own, then believing she was so special because she was the fated chosen one of the Norse pantheon even as she fought against her own role. She’d told herself so many stories about how different and precious she was, how there was no one else like her anywhere in the world. But she was just like any other human being who had ever wanted to make a difference, and craved power in the process.

  Sally didn’t know why Zach was here, or why he’d stuck around at all. She didn’t know why Opal continued to be her friend when she was being such a petulant and self-important little witch. She looked around the room at the faces of those who had assembled to try to solve this latest problem. They’d each given so much just to keep surviving and carrying forward, far beyond anything her young brain could fathom. If she hadn’t been the Rune Witch, and if they hadn’t needed her so badly . . . She wanted to believe she’d earned her place in the Lodge, somewhere along the way.

  She tried to give these new people, Suleiman’s Spiral, the benefit of the doubt. She tried to see them as just as cluelessly ambitious as she’d been. But her charitable exercise didn’t last long. She remembered the lifeless bodies of Maksim’s parents lying on the ground underneath the antiques warehouse. Sally had killed to protect the people she loved. These guys killed in pursuit of magick.

  But she didn’t want to believe that anyone was beyond redemption. “What about their leader? Maybe if we talk to him?”

  Freyr picked up the Eihwaz rune from the floor and put it in his pocket. Sally thought that was a neat trick from a ghost who couldn’t handle snack crackers. He stepped around the hearth and stood in front of her.

  “They’ve sworn a blood oath, Sally,” he said. “To Utra, after she took Opal. She demanded it, and they happily obliged.”

  Sally shivered with the memory of the new Berserker warriors who’d carved into their own chests when pledging their fealty to her. She hadn’t asked them to do it. She’d begged them to stop. But they had their own code. Managarm had been so angry that they’d chosen her and not him. In the end she’d freed them. She didn’t think Utra would give up her sworn followers quite so easily.

  “And their leader is dead.” Freyr glanced at Thor. “Maksim’s uncle, Emilian. All that black ash in the ritual room? That’s what was left of him.”

  Thor made a disgusted noise and checked the bottoms of his boots.

  “And Utra.” Freyr looked at Heimdall. “Well, she’s nuts.”

  Heimdall nodded. “We’ve seen her.”

  Maggie planted her hands on her hips. “I’ll burn the apple trees, then. If I can’t keep them safe, and if it will prevent these spiral guys and their bitch queen from storming in here . . .”

  “Then they’ll come for the Yggdrasil.” Freya sat down on the hearth ledge. “Any tether to magick. They want what we have, even though I’m not sure they understand what that means. But Utra does. If she can’t get the apples, she’ll take the World Tree. And if she can’t get that, she’ll go after the well.”

  “The well’s not even accessible right now,” Maggie protested. “It’s barely a hole in the ground.”

  “You think Utra cares?” Freya asked.

  While the others shouted at each other about what Utra and her Spiralist henchman might or might not be after, Sally pulled her knees to her chest and clasped her hands around her ankles. Not the apples. Not the Tree. Not even the well. Sally squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to cry. She’s after Loki. And then she’ll come for me.

  12

  It was after midnight, and no one in the house had slept. Maybe the boy. Thor wasn’t sure. There were too many people in the Lodge and still too much for them to do to prepare for the cataclysm that the Norns, Freyr, and even Loki insisted was coming soon.

  Shifting the weight of the massive Amazon Prime box in his arms, Th
or glanced out the window at the falling snow. It was a peaceful and largely ordinary winter night in Oregon. The white blanket on the ground reflected the light of the waning moon. Dark shadows stretched out from the base of the Yggdrasil and from the picnic bench and stone grill he’d built for his parents. Apart from the path Sally and Loki had trudged out to the Tree and back, the snow was undisturbed, and even those footprints were filling in with fluffy white flakes.

  Winter was a time for hibernating and for telling tales and tending to wounds by the fire. It was a season of cold and uncertainty but also of rest and restoration. He always imagined that the final battle, if it ever came, would more or less coincide with the summer solstice. In his daydreams, he saw the full moon slide across the solar disc to block out the sun on the longest day of the year while legendary warrior gods took up arms against each other for the last time.

  After that, they would be done with the world of Midgard, and if Valhalla itself survived, he would join his brethren there to share bottomless steins of mead and overflowing baskets of bread and platters of meat, and they would regale each other with exaggerated, half-true stories of earthly conquests . . . Until when, or what? Thor didn’t know what might come after Valhalla, if anything, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to drink and feast and play at fighting before his restless spirit required a new quest or a new raid to quench his thirst for action.

  But he was about to get more action than he was ready for, if the Norns were right. The white expanse outside the window looked like a lousy and messy place to make a last stand. But Ragnarok was apparently coming at dawn, and he had no time to lose. He wasn’t ready for Valhalla, but the legends said he wouldn’t live beyond this day. Then again, half the players who were foretold to take part in the coming apocalypse weren’t even around anymore—and instead of Odin facing Fenrir and Thor grappling with Jormungand, he and the members of the Lodge would be fighting a rogue goddess from an entirely different pantheon and her magick-hungry mortal followers.

  In Oregon. In winter. In the snow.

  Would Midgard survive? Or his family? Thor didn’t know. Trying to think beyond the next six or eight hours made his head hurt. He had enough to worry about without considering if it was just or even possible for his non-immortal family to join him in Valhalla, or if they and all the creatures of every realm might simply be wiped out of existence with the fall of the Yggdrasil.

  “Happy thoughts,” he whispered as he continued down the stairs. Reaching the great room, he dropped the cardboard box on one of the leather couches and stood back while the others started rummaging around inside.

  Ted, the leader of the Valkyries, collected the individual packets of nasal wash Heimdall’s dog had accidentally—or accidentally on purpose?—ordered from Amazon. Sally and Freya had devised a plan to mix the dry chemicals with salt and herbs from the kitchen and use that to form a protective barrier around the Lodge property. There were hundreds of packets, and Ted handed a full bag of them to a new Valkyrie, a young guy named Miguel.

  Thor hadn’t seen an Hispanic Valkyrie before, but it made as much sense as anything else in this twenty-first century pantheon. The Valkyries were a gay biker gang. A formerly mortal paralegal was now the goddess of the grove. And a short but fiery Hindu had been called up with the last of the Einherjar when Managarm was threatening the Yggdrasil. So why not Miguel, too? It had taken a while for Miguel to find his way to the Valkyries in Portland—a full year after the deaths of Odin and Frigga, and after the young man’s dream of escorting the Lord and Lady of the Lodge through Hel’s domain and to the very gates of Valhalla. That must have been a doozy of an awakening for Miguel, far away in New York City where he was working in a ukulele store and going about his days with no idea who or what a Valkyrie was.

  Thor reached into a massive bowl of cheese crackers and shoved a few into his mouth. He’d been snacking on them for hours. They were unnaturally orange and didn’t taste like anything he could reliably identify as food, but they were oddly addictive.

  Rod thrust a hand into the cardboard box and pulled out a game controller—a hand-held thing for one of the computerized systems Thor had heard the kids in his neighborhood raving about. PlayBox or X-Station. Rod unbound the controller from three different layers of packaging and turned the molded plastic over in his hands. He pushed a few buttons and smiled.

  “You can actually use that thing?” Thor asked.

  “Maybe. I’m thinking of setting up some antipersonnel mines, maybe rig them up to this thing for controlled detonation.”

  Thor grabbed another handful of crackers and filled his mouth with them instead of objecting to the use of explosives on the Lodge property, and against mortals. He’d fought plenty of modern mortals at the Battle of the White Oak Yggdrasil on these same grounds. They’d been called as Berserkers and used rather cruelly by Managarm the Moon Dog, but they’d come at Thor and Odin and the others with just as much fervor and frenzy as their legendary predecessors. Mortal or not, whoever these Spiralists were who were following Utra had already taken lives on their own quest. They’d made their choice.

  Freyr stepped up beside him. Or maybe he floated over. Thor hadn’t gotten a good look at his possibly-dead-again cousin’s feet. He added that to his mental list of things to do if he survived Ragnarok. Instead of the usual clap on the shoulder that Thor had come to expect, Freyr kept his ghostly hands shoved in his ethereal pockets.

  “Not exactly the arsenal I thought we’d be using,” Freyr said. Thor pointed out that Ted and the other Valkyries had brought at least a score of broadswords and battle axes with them, but then he saw Loki climb a ladder to help Saga string up some solar-powered pumpkin lights in case the power went out. He didn’t have to ask what good solar-powered lights would do inside a building—it was likely the roof would get blown off by magick just a few hours hence.

  “I’d been itching for action,” Thor admitted to his translucent Vanir cousin. “But I was thinking more along the lines of an old troll gone rogue, or an escaped djinn vowing retribution on all of humanity for his centuries-long imprisonment. Or something boring like a nature spirit wreaking havoc over a convoluted love triangle.”

  He turned quickly to Freyr. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” Freyr nodded toward Vesha as she approached the cardboard box with hesitating steps and rummaged through the remainders. She pulled out a blond-haired, orange-tanned female doll in a silver space suit.

  Thor couldn’t remember the name of the doll, though he’d seen advertisements for her various incarnations for decades. Bobbie? Pammy? He’d seen the same doll in every get up from swimsuits and tutus to SCUBA gear and military fatigues. Now apparently she was also an astronaut.

  “What do you think she’s going to do with that?” Freyr asked.

  Thor grunted. He was learning to keep his mouth shut, at least some of the time. Utra and that doll were both blond, and there was maybe the “star” connection between them as well—the Morning Star and the astronaut? Thor didn’t know if there was any overlap between voodoo and Eastern European Roma magick or whatever else Vesha might have up her sleeve, but he imagined the plastic astronaut might make a decent focus for object magick.

  Loki climbed down the ladder. His movements were hurried but careful, and Thor could practically hear the old god’s joints creaking.

  “What’s coming at dawn is a battle for magick itself,” Loki said, his back still to Thor and Freyr. With stuttering steps, he moved the ladder a meter or so to the left and started climbing back up. His breath came in spasms between his words. “It’s not just the boy . . . or the human traffickers. This . . . This is the real thing. And we all have to do what we can.”

  Vesha glanced quickly at Thor, then clutched the space-faring doll to her chest and hurried toward the kitchen. A collection of plastic dinosaurs were the only things left in the box. Thor gathered them up and arranged them on the breakfast bar separating the great room from the kitchen. If anyone
could make use of these toys in the magick free-for-all to come, he wanted them to be easily accessible.

  Hearty voices echoed down the hall from the front of the house—probably Tariq and a few of the former Einherjar arriving, and none too soon. The Lodge was grasping at straws, trying to come up with a plan to face another enemy whose tactics and strategies were unknown. But Thor and his brethren were all so tired and worn down by the years of crises, one after the other, with scarcely any rest in between. They were scrambling for defensive measures and piecing together everyone’s best guesses into a slapdash whole. Forget Ragnarok—even a single rogue troll would have been big trouble right about now.

  Thor strode past the kitchen to greet the newly arrived warriors. He was still the Norse god of thunder and bluster, at least for the next few hours. Whether Ragnarok would leave him in Midgard or dispatch him to Valhalla, he expected he was going to have one hell of a story to tell.

  Maksim huddled beneath a thick quilt and listened to the shouting voices from below. Everyone sounded angry and afraid. He wanted to tell them to be quiet, that being loud only made it easier for the bad men to find them. But then he remembered that the bad men already knew about the Lodge and were on their way. They wanted Maksim and his magick. Maksim wished he’d never shown Sally what he could do. He wished he’d never confided in Magnus. He wished he’d never climbed up out of the tunnel. At least then he’d still be with his mother and father.

  Bonnie and Saga had moved the bed’s narrow frame into the center of the guest bedroom, away from walls and windows and any falling plaster or shattering glass that might fill the coming hours. Laika the wolf-dog sat alert at the foot of the bed, with the witch’s orange and black cat beside her. Their ears flicked in near unison and their eyes tracked every sound on the other side of the closed bedroom door. Maksim knew the heavy wooden headboard and hand-sewn quilts offered only a temporary refuge. They’d have to move to someplace quieter and darker once the fighting started. He wondered if he would be safer back in the tunnel with the others.