“One advantage of most of us being tall and blond,” she said with a small laugh. “Nobody ever questions the family claim.”
Donata smiled at her. “I guess your folks end up in the hospital a lot, considering the kind of risks they take.” She couldn’t really criticize, since she was a cop, although it wasn’t as though her work brought her into the line of fire. At least, it hadn’t until she’d stumbled across that damned painting.
“Oh, not really. We’re not much for doctors and such. Mostly we have our own healers and depend on the fact that our bodies can take a lot of punishment. But sometimes there are things like this that are beyond our skills. I suppose we’re here often enough that the folks who work here can recognize someone from Gimle when they see them.” Astrid stopped in front of the curtain and took a deep breath, a look of deliberate calm replacing the one of worry as she stepped through, tugging Donata with her when she hesitated.
The first thing Donata saw was Magnus, looming over the bed in a once-tan tee shirt now soaked with a red wetness that made the shirt cling to his abs. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, but then her brain caught up with her eyes and she realized that the blood wasn’t his. It must have come from the woman lying in the cubicle, since there was a stark white bandage taped to her forehead. Head wounds bled like crazy.
“Hey,” Donata said as Astrid moved to stand next to her son, squeezing his hand once before turning her attention to Lora.
“Hey yourself,” Magnus said. “Thanks for coming.”
“What happened?” Astrid asked in a quiet voice. Various machines beeped and hummed throughout the small emergency room, and the curtains around their space further muffled their voices, but she clearly didn’t want anyone else to overhear Ulfhednar business. “All I heard was that she fell.”
“And something about you being in the treetops,” Donata added. “Could that have been right?”
Magnus gave her a tight smile. “Yes, today’s test involved moving through the forest without ever touching your feet to the ground. It’s a guerrilla-warfare thing. Very useful in some situations. Also a lot of fun, most of the time.” He looked down at his friend. “Not this time.”
“Do you know if she saw a . . . saw something, like the others did?” Donata asked.
“No one is really sure what happened, although I’d bet on it, since she tends to be better at this exercise than anyone else, even me. But she’s been unconscious since we brought her in.”
“We used to call her ‘little monkey,’” Astrid said in a sad voice. “When she was young, it seemed as though she was always perched in a tree somewhere.”
A white-coated doctor came into the room, a tiny woman with short dark hair and a no-nonsense attitude. She glanced from the clipboard in her hand to the patient in the bed and then at the three of them.
“I’m Dr. Lee. You’re the family?” she asked, then continued talking without waiting for an answer. “Lora’s vitals are stable and she seems to be out of danger for now, but we’ll be admitting her as soon as they can get a bed ready.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Magnus asked.
The doctor looked down at the chart. “It is too soon to say. The gash on her head looks worse than it is, but she has a concussion and hasn’t regained consciousness since she took her fall. That’s not that unusual, and hopefully she’ll wake up soon. But the longer it takes, the more concerned we’ll be about possible brain damage.”
She glanced at Astrid and tightened her lips, maybe assuming the taller woman was Lora’s mother. “I’m afraid her other injuries are also quite serious. She broke her back in three places and has a couple of cracked ribs as well as a fractured right ankle. To be honest, I’m amazed that her vital signs are as strong as they are, considering the extent of the damage. She’s clearly a tough young woman. Time will tell. You’re welcome to wait around until they move her upstairs, but there isn’t likely to be any change in the next few hours. If you’d like to go home, I can have one of the nurses call you when she wakes up.” The if was unspoken.
“Thank you, Doctor, but we’ll stay,” Astrid said.
A brisk nod was all the response she got as the doctor hurried out to deal with her next patient.
Donata took a few steps closer so she was standing on the opposite side of the bed. “Can she heal from those kinds of wounds?” she asked quietly.
Magnus shrugged, the skin on his face looking tight and pale. “Like the doctor said, only time will tell. The ribs and ankle should be fine, as long as they were relatively clean breaks. The back . . . maybe, maybe not. But the doctor was right about one thing: Lora is tough. If anyone can bounce back from this, she can.” He winced. “Maybe I should have used a word other than ‘bounce.’”
His mother patted him on the arm, and the tiny lines around his eyes relaxed a little.
Eventually a couple of orderlies bustled into the cubicle and transferred Lora’s inert body efficiently onto a gurney, trailing the IV pole along behind them like a bobbing fishing lure. Magnus, Astrid, and Donata followed, reminding Donata irreverently of a mother duck and her ducklings.
On the other end of the trip, Lora was placed in a bed and hooked up to monitors that beeped periodically with their own unmusical rhythm. A nurse popped her head in briefly and took Lora’s vitals again, nodded at the three of them, then popped back out without ever bothering to introduce herself.
Donata hated hospitals.
Astrid bustled off to find some coffee, and Donata pulled up a chair to sit next to Magnus by Lora’s bedside.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, putting one hand gently on his arm. “Why don’t you give me your shirt and I’ll try to rinse some of that blood out of it in the bathroom. It will still be damp, but at least it won’t be quite as gory. Or would you rather I went out into town and tried to find you a new one?”
Magnus shifted his gaze from the bed to her, seeming to take her in fully for the first time since they’d gotten there. “Never mind about the shirt. It’s not bothering me. I’d rather you stayed.” He peered at her more closely. “Are you okay, ’Nata? You look terrible. I promise none of this blood is mine.”
She gave a shaky laugh. “I know. I figured that out pretty quickly, although it was quite the shock at first. I just had a rough morning, that’s all.” She glanced down at Lora. “Not as rough as yours, obviously.”
“What happened? I thought you were going to try and summon Freddy’s brother. Didn’t it go well?”
Donata’s stomach flip-flopped at the memory and she swallowed hard, breathing through her nose. That was a mistake, since the sharp smell of the hand sanitizer the nurse had used mixed with the general scents of fear and sickness and made acid rise up in the base of her throat.
She shook it off the best she could, trying to focus on Magnus instead of herself. “That’s an understatement. Not only did it not work, it all went kind of sidewise. I don’t really know a better way to explain it. I’ve never had anything like that happen before. I’ve blown stuff up and set things on fire, and I’ve had plain old nothing happen, but this . . . this was different. Off, somehow. And it made me feel kind of sick. I’m okay, though. Just confused and frustrated.”
Magnus reached out and held on to Lora’s hand. “I know exactly what you mean. So I take it we’re not any closer to figuring out how to stop this from happening again.”
Donata shook her head, wanting to kick herself for letting him down. “No, I’m sorry. I’ll keep trying. I’m going to call my great-aunt Tatiana in a little while and see if she has any ideas. She knows more about magic than anyone else I’ve ever met.”
She looked at the still form lying in the bed. Under normal circumstances, she would have offered to try some healing on the woman. Although that talent was more her sister’s specialty, all Witches could do at least some basic healing work, drawing on the universal
energy around them. But considering how badly things had gone earlier, Donata didn’t think it was worth taking the chance that something might go wrong.
“I just got a message from the elders,” Astrid said, walking into the room with three cardboard coffee cups held in her hands. “They’re calling a meeting tonight and they want us all there. They’ve stopped the trials for the day, so you’re not missing anything, Magnus.” Her light-colored brows were drawn together in concern.
“Well, that’s good, anyway,” Magnus said.
“Not necessarily,” Astrid said. “They’re talking about stopping them altogether this year. And we’re going to have to convince them not to.”
Chapter Twelve
Donata didn’t realize how much she’d needed to talk to someone sympathetic until she heard her great-aunt’s high, light voice on the other end of the phone.
“Hello, dear,” Tatiana said. Donata could hear her great-aunt’s parrot familiar squawking in the background and could easily envision his colorful body perched on the elderly woman’s bony shoulder as usual. “Your mother was just complaining to me the other day about your repeated absence from family dinner. As if there won’t be another one next Saturday and the Saturday after. So, are you home now?”
“No, Auntie, I’m still in Maine. I’m actually calling you for some advice.”
“Maine?” Tatiana sounded disbelieving, as if Donata had told her she was on the moon. “Your mother didn’t mention Maine. What on earth are you doing there?”
“My old friend Magnus came to me needing help with a ghost problem in his hometown of Gimle, and he was there for me when I needed his help dealing with”—she lowered her voice, although the only people standing outside the hospital anywhere near her were a couple of orderlies sneaking a quick cigarette in one corner and a crying woman talking in urgent tones into her cell phone in another—“that painting. I owed him, and I had some time off coming, so I agreed to go along and see what I could do.”
“Magnus?” Her great-aunt’s voice perked up. “Wasn’t he that tall, gorgeous blond man you were dating for a while? You brought him home for dinner once. I’d have gone along if he asked me too.” She cackled. “He was quite the hunk, as I recall.”
Donata rolled her eyes. “If you remember that dinner, you’ll probably also remember that Mother was horribly rude to him, in the ultra-proper way she has that is so subtle you can never quite call her on it. Father quizzed him on how much money he made as a mercenary for hire, and my sisters alternately ignored him and ogled him when their husbands weren’t looking. It was a disaster.”
“I actually found it quite amusing, dear,” her great-aunt said. “Family dinners are usually so boring. And I don’t think your mother meant to be rude, exactly. She just didn’t know what to think when you brought an Ulfhednar home for dinner. I suspect she was just worried for you and retreated into that frosty-politeness thing she does. Witches rarely marry outside their own race, you know, with the exception of the occasional Human.”
“I wasn’t going to marry him, for Hecate’s sake. We’d just been dating for a while, and he was missing his own family, and Mother kept pressing me to bring home the boy I was dating. It seemed like a good idea at the time, although I don’t know why.”
“Well, if you’ve called me for relationship advice, you’re barking up the wrong tree, dear,” Tatiana said wryly. “That was never my strong suit, I’m afraid.”
Donata opened her mouth to ask her great-aunt if she had ever been seriously involved with someone—it seemed as though she must have been at least once in her 117 years. But then Donata remembered how few personal boundaries her great-aunt had, and thought the better of it. There were probably some things she was better off not knowing. Especially in detail.
“Don’t worry, Auntie, Magnus and I aren’t involved in that way anymore.” Mostly. “I was actually calling for magical advice.”
“Ah, now that is my area of expertise. What can I help you with?”
In the background, Luigi squawked, “Help you with, help you with.”
Donata gave her great-aunt a brief summary of the situation and then told her about the way things had gone so horribly wrong that morning.
“Goodness,” Tatiana said. “That is worrisome. You can normally do that sort of spellwork in your sleep. In fact, as I understand it, you perform that kind of magic for your job on a daily basis. Has such a thing ever happened before?”
“No,” Donata said. “Never. That’s why I’m calling you. I was wondering if you had any idea what could have caused that kind of reaction, or suggestions for alternatives I can try.” She definitely didn’t want to repeat that particular approach anytime soon.
“Hmm. Let me think.”
Donata could almost see her great-aunt standing by the cauldron in her basement workroom, tapping her pointy chin with a wooden stirring spoon, no doubt leaving some kind of herbal smudge behind. Homesickness threatened to overwhelm her with an unusual wave of emotion.
“I suppose that if someone has used magical means to draw in the Ulfhednar’s ghosts, they could have built some kind of defensive element into the spell, which would rebound on any Witch who was trying to investigate or undo it,” her great-aunt said. “That would be a complicated working, but not impossible for someone with enough talent or experience. I could do it, for instance, although I don’t know many others who could.”
“I certainly wouldn’t know how to go about it.”
“No, I don’t expect you would,” Tatiana said with a certain asperity. “They don’t teach that sort of thing in Witch School, thank the goddess.” She thought some more. “Mind you, it doesn’t have to be a Witch. There are magic users among the other Paranormal races, although they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Shamans or priestesses, or that sort of thing.
“It isn’t very common, though. I’ve heard rumors that the Fae have a few whose talents aren’t limited to glamour or enchantment, but I can’t imagine any reason why the Fae would have any interest in sending ghosts to haunt the Ulfhednar. As far as I know, the two races generally ignore each other.”
“I can’t figure out why anyone would have an interest in sending ghosts to haunt the Ulfhednar, but clearly someone does.”
“I suppose . . .” Tatiana sounded unusually hesitant. “I suppose you’ve considered the Cabal. They are said to have magic users as well, although they never liked to admit to them, and we have very little idea what they’re up to these days. In fact, until your run-in with them earlier this year, there were some on the Council who swore they no longer existed.” She made a low sound remarkably like one of Magnus’s growls. “I for one would have been much happier if that had been true.”
“Me too,” Donata said with feeling. The Council tended to annoy her with their high-handed ways, but the few Cabal followers she’d dealt with had given her the screaming heebie-jeebies. There was nothing like the gleam of fanaticism in your enemies’ eyes to raise the short hairs on the back of your neck. “There is a priest in the neighboring village who is acting pretty strangely, but I doubt a Cabal member would be practicing right out in the open like that and drawing so much attention to himself.”
“Hmph. He could be hiding in plain sight, I suppose,” her great-aunt said. “Be careful around him.”
“Believe it,” Donata promised. “In the meanwhile, if I can’t use my regular approach to summon the local ghosts, can you think of any other techniques I could try instead? It has always been so easy for me to speak to the dead, even without using a formal ritual, I never bothered to learn any other way.”
Tatiana chuckled. “I can still remember the day your mother figured out that your imaginary friends weren’t so imaginary. You were about five, I think, and having a charming tea party with your great-grandmother Rosa, who’d been dead for about fifty years. Her manners were still impeccable, of course, and w
hen she offered your mother the sugar, Celestina let out a shriek that nearly shattered her best crystal. Once she calmed down, she was very proud, of course. It’s a rare Witch who can commune with the dead the way you can.”
Sure, except for now, when I really need to.
“Auntie . . .” Donata needed to go back inside and join the others soon. She didn’t have time for a stroll down memory lane.
“Right, so you need something simpler. What about a Ouija board? I’ve had rather good luck with mine on the rare occasions I felt the need to use it. Mind you, it’s just gathering dust right now, since my focus these days is on coming up with new magical herbal tinctures. Would you like me to send it to you? You might be able to find one in a shop somewhere, I suppose, but you’re much better off using one that has already been cleansed and blessed, don’t you think?”
“That would be fabulous, if you don’t mind, Auntie,” Donata said with relief. “If you could just send it to Magnus Torvald in Gimle, Maine, I’m sure it will get to me. It’s a very small town. I’ll make sure it gets back to you safely.”
“Just make sure that you get yourself back safely, dear. I can replace a Ouija board but not my favorite great-niece.”
Donata smiled fondly, knowing the other woman would sense it even if she couldn’t see it. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Magnus would never let anything happen to me.”
“Indeed not, not if he could prevent it,” Tatiana said. “Do you mind a little unsolicited advice, dear?”
From most people, yes; but for her great-aunt, she’d make an exception. “Do I have any choice?” she asked, laughter in her voice.
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