Chaos Magic

by Jennifer Willis

  He climbed the short flight of steps and pushed open the door. The letters weighed heavily in his hands.

  The kettle came to a boil. He poured hot water over a ball of loose tea and let the aroma of fresh herbs fill his home’s three hundred square feet. He inhaled deeply through his nose and smiled. He still had some power left, and he’d called on it to heal his bruised and swollen face.

  Leaving the tea to steep, he sat in his small nook of a study and sorted through the letters. He compared the returned envelopes to the list of known surviving deities he’d printed out at Sally and Opal’s apartment a couple of months earlier. His list should have taken up a full ream of paper, each page filled with names of ancients and newer powers, but this list was only twenty pages long. Too many Old Ones had faded into memory, and too few new immortals were created.

  He’d mailed the same plea to each name on the list. He didn’t waste time with formalities or gossip. It was a funny truth that the more time he spent in this world, the less patience he had for not getting straight to the point.

  The magick of Midgard was dying, he explained, though he was careful to use language that would appeal to his recipients’ pantheons. Odin and Frigga were the latest in a centuries-long culling of power and without them, the modern world of Midgard lost its anchor. Or so Loki speculated. He couldn’t be sure the world wouldn’t rip itself apart at the magickal seams. Only having it happen would prove his theory.

  He’d mailed his letters in the middle of summer, headed to every continent. His letters were written in old runic script, in hieroglyphs and Olde English and ancient Mandarin—every language conceivably used by those of power still in the world. And then he’d waited. He busied himself in his garden, growing lavender and tomatoes and mint and onions. He distracted himself by taking up woodworking again, until he realized he was cluttering up what little space he had with useless, arcane items which had no meaning in this twenty-first century world. But he’d made a fine chunk of money selling his artisanal wares on Etsy.

  After a month, the envelopes he’d paid outrageous postage to send out far and wide started trickling back to him. Undeliverable. No such address. Addressee unknown.

  Loki sorted through the returned letters and struck one name after another from his list. He was nearly at the end of his string of names. There were a few on the list yet to be eliminated, but he had little hope those particular deities were still roaming free. As Loki drew a line through Thoth’s name toward the bottom of the last page, he had to accept the unsettling probability that he and the members of the Lodge might well be the last survivors of the world’s long history of magick.

  Loki rose from his desk and dropped the unopened letters into the kindling bucket next to the woodstove. It had been a naïve hope from the start.

  He reached for his cup of elderberry-licorice tea with ginger and cinnamon—one of Frigga’s concoctions, but he couldn’t remember what she’d called it—and stepped outside. He sat on the top step and let the mug warm his hands as he breathed in the tea’s aroma. It was supposed to reduce stress and promote mental clarity, and he figured he could benefit from both. He sipped his tea and watched gray clouds roll across a pale, white-blue sky.

  There wasn’t any question about what to do next, though it was the very thing he’d hoped to avoid. One of the things. He’d made too many enemies over the long centuries. Perhaps it was fitting that the Old One who hated him most was likely his last chance.

  Loki gulped down his tea, rested the empty cup by the door, and walked into the woods.

  He found the ritual spot easily enough. To anyone not on the lookout for telltale signs of residual magick, the space would have looked like one more clearing strewn with forest debris. For Loki, it was a portal to potential redemption.

  The spell he’d had Sally work wasn’t a complete failure. He’d been foolish to expect the immediate return of Odin and Frigga, though the working was complicated and drew on his own reserves in addition to Sally’s magick. But it had been worth the risk. That Sally was unhappy with him was a temporary inconvenience. She would come around. She would have to.

  This excursion was simple compared to the ritual of the night before. All the pieces were already in place. Sally had opened the portal—the great rush of swirling wind was evidence of that—and he hadn’t asked her to close it before she punched him and stormed off. It seemed an oversight at the time. Now, in the early afternoon of another chilly autumn day, it was quite the boon.

  He stepped to the center of what had been his circle of runes and sigils, and thought again of Sally. He should have started to share his knowledge of runic designs with the young Rune Witch. That area of study alone could take decades. He’d have to get creative about speeding up the process if he wanted to prepare her for the years to come.

  But he had bigger and more immediate fish to dry. Or was it fry? Both made sense, he thought. He was still trying to get his head around slang from a hundred years ago and often had no idea what the humans around him were trying to say. He allowed a moment’s gratitude that Sally wasn’t hip or cool or whatever the term was nowadays for a young person skilled in the ways of contemporary culture.

  He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. He tuned out the birdsong from the tree branches and the smell of earth and decomposing leaves at his feet. He homed in on the rhythm of his heart. It was a matter of matching frequencies, then he could pass through any portal he chose. That was another trick he would teach Sally.

  He slowed his heartbeat with determined will, then sped it up and slowed it again. The pattern wasn’t overly intricate, but it had been designed to prevent unintentional passage, especially by a random mortal. He found the flow of peaks and valleys he wanted, took a breath, and vanished from the forest.

  5

  “And so, as you can see in this slide of a cross-section of pumice, softer rocks like pumice and also sandstone are more porous and less dense when compared to marble and granite.” Sally’s geology professor droned on at the lectern. A close-up photo of a piece of holey rock was projected onto the screen of the arena-style lecture hall.

  Sally was trying hard not to doze off. If not for the coffee at Bonnie’s house, she was sure she’d be snoring already.

  Breakfast had been a disaster. She’d told them about Loki’s mystery spell, how he’d used her, and that she wasn’t positive he wasn’t up to no good. How was it possible Thor took her seriously when Heimdall dismissed her out of hand?

  Ever since Frigga and Odin departed for Valhalla, it was like she was living in a bizarro version of an already strange world. It was bad enough she was the legendary Rune Witch bound to serve the modern Norse pantheon; it was worse that the only mortal people she could talk to about it were Opal, Bonnie, Rod, and a bunch of Valkyrie bikers.

  Sally blinked, and another photo of bubbly rock filled the screen. Her professor continued to extoll the virtues of pumice with the aid of a laser pointer.

  “These rocks are naturally lighter but they’re also more permeable to water. Now, pumice is also very porous. See that? It’s an igneous rock that formed when volcanic lava was exposed to colder water or air, and that’s where the bubbles come from, and that’s what weakens the rock structure.”

  Sally’s laptop—the one that barely fit into her bag and weighed twice what it should thanks to Opal’s chaos-protection measures—was propped on the swiveling half-desk attached to her chair. Her fingers moved unenthusiastically across the keyboard as she pretended to take notes. Between her outrage over Loki and her angry imaginings of what kind of normal life she might have if not for the Lodge, she’d barely slept and was running on fumes.

  And she was in pain. The knuckles on her left hand were scabbing over.

  The image on the screen changed again.

  “Ah, yes. Now, in this slide you can see a cross-section of sandstone. Now, sandstone and limestone are sedimentary rocks. They’re also highly permeable because they have been formed wit
hout a great deal of compression.”

  Sally looked down at her computer screen. Apparently, she’d been typing “I HATE MY LIFE,” over and over. She navigated to PSU’s Career Center portal and started taking one of at least a dozen online professional inventory assessments—a fancy name for career quizzes.

  If Maggie wanted to choose her own Rune Witch, that was just fine. Sally would find something else to do.

  She clicked through the questions. Yes, she did enjoy research. Yes, she liked working with her hands. Her favorite class in elementary school was reading. She preferred the Living section of the newspaper to World News, but she didn’t really keep up on current events. She liked the sound of a roaring fire more than birdsong, most of the time. She chose Egyptian Turquoise as her favorite from a selection of sixteen different shades of teal. How did she feel about confrontation? She was jaded in her approach to challenging people—but she was angry at everyone in her life, so maybe she wasn’t in the best frame of mind to answer that particular question.

  There was a soft chuckle somewhere behind her. Sally turned and saw a boy, two rows back and to the left, watching her. His longish hair fell casually around his tanned face. He slouched in his seat, relaxed and confident in that way cool kids always were, something Sally had never come close to emulating. When she caught his eye, he smiled and scribbled something on his tablet.

  Sally blinked at the boy. No, not a boy. A young man. A young man who had been looking at her.

  He glanced in her direction again, and Sally immediately turned back to her laptop, the professor, the ceiling tiles. She was nineteen years old and had no idea how to flirt, or how to handle a cute guy looking her way. A hot prickle spread up her neck and across her face. She cast furtive glances to the students on either side of her, wondering if anyone else noticed her sudden and perfectly quiet freakout in the middle of Geology 103.

  Sally straightened her spine and told herself she was being ridiculous. So what if some boy was staring at her in class? She had more interesting things to worry about, like her fabulous new career—in whatever exciting industry the quiz decided—after she got out of her mentorship with Loki. After the stunt he pulled, there had to be a loophole to release her from his tutelage.

  Freya would object. But Freya should have taken Frigga’s place, and Odin’s, too. Then there wouldn’t be any warring over who would run the Lodge or what to serve on feast nights. Sally would still need to learn about chaos, but she could have argued for balancing those studies with mentorship from Freya.

  While the professor delved into a weird tangent about outdoor fire pits and what kind of rocks were most likely to explode when exposed to flame, Sally opened a new email window. Sandstone, according to the professor, is non-combustible and a good thermal insulator. Freya wasn’t answering her phone or responding to text messages. But she’d promised to check her email periodically.

  Granite will crack, sometimes explosively.

  Sally’s message was simultaneously short and rambling, a plea for help when she didn’t know what kind of help she wanted. Did she really not want to be the Rune Witch anymore? Would she be happy as a barista or a digital product manager, and then lighting the occasional ritual candle on Samhain or at midnight on Walpurgis Night?

  She hit “send” and went back to the career quiz. She answered a few questions about cartoon characters, weather, and the importance of loyalty in friendships. By the time the quiz was prompting her for her favorite late-night snack foods, she was choosing options at random.

  Could she have a normal life? Maybe she didn’t need to be all that happy. Happy enough. Content. Not unhappy. She could live with that, a not terribly unhappy normal life. Boring, even. But only in spots. She didn’t want a bland existence where all she did was go to work at a dull, soul-crushing job and then crawl home through rush-hour traffic to fix herself an over-salted meal out of a box and eat it in front of another vapid reality TV show.

  The results were in. “You would be happiest as a . . . ROCKET SCIENTIST!” the test proclaimed in bright green letters. Sally didn’t bother reading the description and university course requirements. She scanned down the page to see what other professions were recommended. It was a mishmash of Cat Groomer, Sculptor, Early Education Specialist, Cartographer, Nail Technician, Neurosurgeon, and Telephone Psychic.

  Nowhere was Rune Witch listed.

  Students around her started packing up their laptops and notebooks and climbed over her to make their way out of the lecture hall. Sally glanced quickly over her shoulder. That guy slid his tablet and water bottle into a beat-up messenger bag, then met her gaze again and smiled.

  He looked familiar, and Sally felt herself blush anew. She knew him from somewhere. He’d probably been sitting behind her in class for weeks, but her brain kept trying to pull up some other context. Powell’s City of Books, or maybe he was one of her neighbors in the apartment building?

  She was staring at him. She turned away and focused on packing up her own stuff and getting out of the lecture hall. By the time she joined the throng moving toward the exit, the boy was gone.

  The corridor outside was a crush of students going to and from classrooms. After craning her neck up and down the hallway, she gave up trying to spot her mystery admirer and ducked into an alcove of vending machines. She bought a plastic bottle of cranberry juice and nearly exclaimed in victory when the machine processed the transaction without the slightest hitch. Sipping her juice, she stepped out of Cramer Hall and spotted the same guy leaning against a massive concrete planter and tapping on his phone.

  Was he waiting for her? Sally screwed the cap back onto her juice and smoothed down her hair. He was engrossed in whatever was on his screen, and she brushed a few breakfast crumbs off her shapeless sweater. She had at least one less flattering item of clothing in her closet, so it could have been worse. As long as she was imagining a new life, why not be a cat-grooming rocket surgeon with a boyfriend? She adjusted her backpack and strode toward him.

  When it came to boys—attractive boys, boys she might want to date or do naughty things with—Sally had no practice. The closest she’d come was Niall at Trinity College in Dublin but he’d been her friend, nothing more. She’d never been on a fake date with anybody, much less a real one.

  He sensed her approach and looked up, mildly startled.

  “Hi,” she said with too much forced sparkle. “I’m Sally.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He seemed bemused. “I’m Kyle.”

  “Kyle?” Sally cocked her head and hoped it looked cute. “Don’t I know you from someplace?” She nearly cringed when she heard the tired pick-up line on her lips, but he chuckled.

  “Last time I saw you, you were surrounded by bulldozers.”

  “Bulldozers?” Sally tried to remember any construction zones she might have wandered through while contemplating one of Loki’s homework assignments. She’d been prone to tuning out her surroundings since starting her chaos studies. Two weeks earlier she’d found herself on the pedestrian walkway of the Hawthorne Bridge, halfway across the Willamette River, with no idea why she’d headed that way.

  Kyle grinned. “Yeah. Managarm and his Berserkers on their bulldozers, going after the Yggdrasil?”

  Sally felt the smile vanish from her face. “Right. That.”

  So Kyle was Einherjar, a modern person strengthened by the spirit of an ancient warrior. And the last time he’d seen Sally, she’d looked like a bedraggled hag from her misdirected magick. Maybe that’s why he’d been staring at her. Probably not a gallant suitor after all.

  “I’m usually with my friend, Trevor. You know, Trevor Chase? We were students at Odin’s school,” Kyle said. “Man, was that crazy finding out the truth about the big guy. Never saw that coming.”

  Sally remembered what Odin had called Kyle and Trevor: The Hooligans. They’d both been called as Einherjar, along with Bonnie, Tariq, and the Portland State football team and pep squad. Most of the people who found themselves i
n sudden service to Odin slid quietly back into their old lives, though they never forgot what happened on that battlefield.

  Sally refreshed her smile. “So, you go to PSU now?”

  “Yeah.” Kyle laughed again. “Portland State Vikings.”

  But he had been watching her in class, right? Maybe he liked what he saw. Maybe it made sense for the Rune Witch to pair off with someone who already knew what she was, and who had already passed the course on Bad Things Happen Around Sally 101.

  “Anyway, Heimdall wanted me to keep an eye on you.” Kyle slipped his phone into his pocket. “Make sure everything’s okay here on campus.”

  “Heimdall?”

  Kyle’s smile remained genuine and bright. “So we can sit together in class, if you want. Share notes or something. You could tell me something, anything, that I can report to Heimdall and show him I’m doing a good job.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “No, you can’t sit with me. No, you can’t spy on me for Heimdall. Just leave me alone!” Sally’s cheeks burned as she turned and marched away. She was hot and nearly shivering at the same time, roiling in a mixture of embarrassment and rage and some other emotions she didn’t have a handle on.

  Of course the cute boy wasn’t interested in her. Not like that.

  She took another inventory of her appearance and wondered if it was physically possible for her to dress any more blandly. Even in Portland, where all manner of personal expression through style was on display, Sally had no outward identity. Her hair color was natural. She didn’t have any piercings or permanent ink.

  The grassy quads of the South Park Blocks were filled with clutches of matching students. Sci-fi nerds and jocks. Digital nomads with high-tech bags and performance fabrics and all the latest generation gadgets strapped to their bodies. New-school emo kids and fledgling hipsters and punks.