The Black Pool (Valhalla Book 3)

by Jennifer Willis

  “Powers of the East!” she called out in a thick twang that was at perfect odds with the air of mystery she was working to create. “Spirit of the rising sun, and of air. I call on the goddesses Athena and Lilith. I call on Aradia and Gabriel. Eagle and hawk . . .”

  Sally pinched the bridge of her nose against the headache she felt coming on, thanks to the incense smoke and to her roommate’s jumbled invocation. Clare was mixing her traditions again, calling on deities and elements like she was choosing toppings from a frozen yogurt bar. Sally coughed.

  Clare glared at her. “Hail and welcome!” she called out in a louder, strained voice. She lowered her arms and planted her hands on her hips.

  “You can’t make noise while I’m calling the quarters!” Clare sniffed, then smiled sideways at Sally. “See you walk in this direction, deosil,” Clare stepped to the next candle, ninety-degrees around her four-pointed circle on the floor, and faced the door to her bedroom. “This is for creative energy. You go the other way to dispel the magick.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Sally watched Clare bend down to light the candle and then call on the powers of the South before moving around the circle to do the same for West and North. Clare then held her shiny wand out from her body and turned in a slow circle. “So first you call the quarters, and then you cast your circle.”

  Coming back around to her starting place, Clare slipped the wand into her pocket. She looked at Sally for a long moment, and then used her index and middle fingers to trace the shape of a door in the invisible, energetic circle she’d cast along the perimeter of the ring of candles.

  Sally guessed that Clare assumed such an action was necessary for her voice to be heard from within the closed circle.

  “It’s time for you to go, Sally.”

  Sally shrugged and headed toward her bedroom door.

  “And no peeking!” Clare called after her. “You’ll ruin my spell.”

  Sally kept her mouth shut as she crossed the threshold into her room and closed the door behind her. The music from the sitting room swelled, and Sally glanced at the floor to see if any incense smoke was creeping into her room beneath the door. It had happened before.

  She watched and listened for a full minute, but this spell of Clare’s appeared quieter and less incendiary than several of her previous attempts. Sally breathed a sigh of relief. She sat down at her small desk and powered on her laptop. It was Friday night, when other students were out in the pubs getting drunk and shouting out the lyrics to bawdy songs, but Sally was anxious to get started on her paper for her Global Currents class.

  “Personal ethics and responsibility in the larger community,” Sally whispered to the blank screen of her word processor.

  Sally rested her fingers on the keyboard. She considered writing about global warming and the importance of personal behaviors like recycling and choosing mass transit, but that was too obvious. Professor Ball would expect precisely that kind of moralizing from an American, and he’d emphasized to his students that he was looking to be “surprised.” Sally next ruled out a treatise on Random Acts of Kindness and the “seventh generation” outlook that had been co-opted from Native American wisdom by one social or environmental cause after another.

  Sally imagined her professor was pushing his students to examine their mundane lives alongside their starry-eyed aspirations and decide precisely what kind of impact they each wanted to have on the world.

  “College is all about molding responsible minds,” her father had told her just before she went through Security at Portland International Airport.

  Sally sighed. She needed this time away from her parents just as much as she needed the break from Odin’s Lodge.

  There was a crash and a small shriek from the next room, followed by a sheepish “I’m okay!” from Clare and the sound of candlesticks banging against each other.

  “Individual magickal responsibility,” Sally muttered to her closed door. Clare fell quiet on the other side.

  Sally smirked at the thought of handing Professor Ball an account of the recent history of Odin’s Lodge in the New World, with details of her own failed rune spells to bring about global peace, how she’d called up an army of particularly troublesome and ineffective Berserkers instead and nearly started Ragnarok by accident.

  About how being born the Norse Moon Witch meant she hadn’t gotten to choose her own path.

  Sally closed her eyes and saw again the faces of the three Fates from the statue in the park.

  Fate does not equal destiny, Sally told herself. Fate is what life hands you, and destiny is what you do with it. Or maybe it was the other way around. She kept getting it mixed up. Either way, Sally feared she’d never be her own person if she kept spending so much time in Odin’s Lodge. So she’d come across the Atlantic to try to carve out some kind of personal identity.

  Sally was tired of being the Moon Witch. There was something to be said for hanging out with Norse gods, casting spells to help save the world more often than she would have thought possible, and learning about the runes from the immortals who had first brought them into the world. But the novelty had worn off.

  Instead of going to the homecoming football game, Sally had been fighting an old god gone bad over the very existence of the Universe. She’d spent summer vacation after junior year dodging Frost Giants and Køjer Devils and struggling with a particularly troublesome set of homemade runes that kept setting everything on fire.

  Come her senior year in high school, instead of stressing about exams and college applications and going shopping with friends for prom dresses, she’d had to intervene between Thor and Saga in a dispute over a bottle of magickal hair dye, help Heimdall deal with a band of mutant skogkatts, and negotiate a truce between Freyr and Loki after an ill-fated espresso machine experiment at the Raven Dojo—when she wasn’t giving Thor relationship advice or hiding from Odin’s foul moods.

  Sally imagined a college paper about her personal exploits with the Norse immortals would earn her not only a failing course grade but a quick trip to the local mental institution, too.

  Her Skype application buzzed, and Sally checked the computer clock. It was going on 7 p.m. in Dublin, which meant her friends in Portland were probably taking a break from their morning shifts at Powells City of Books.

  Sally clicked her trackpad to accept the call, and her screen was soon filled with the faces of Opal and Saga huddled together on the other end of the connection.

  “Sally? Are you there?” Saga was punching random buttons on the computer keyboard and frowning at the web camera.

  “Yeah.” Sally rose out of her chair to turn on the overhead light in her bedroom, then sat back down. “Sorry about that.”

  “Okay, now we can see you.” Opal pushed her glasses up toward the bridge of her nose while Saga sat back and fussed with her own curly, dark tresses. They both sipped hot coffee as they sat at the bookstore’s Information Desk.

  “So?” Saga asked with impatience. “How’s it going?”

  Sally blinked at the video stream on her laptop. “It’s fine. It’s just that I got assigned this paper in one of my classes, and I have no idea what I’m going to write about.”

  “Write about me!” Saga volunteered as she braided random strands of her hair together. Odin’s youngest child, the Norse goddess of history was a perpetual teenager and prone to adolescent outbursts.

  “You know, the mysterious storyteller of ancient legend, weaving tales across time and space to deepen and inform the human experience for all generations,” Saga continued, her eyes wide for effect.

  Opal turned to Saga and frowned. “And what if her paper’s for statistics class?”

  Saga shrugged. “It would still work.”

  “I’m actually not taking a statistics course this term,” Sally said. Saga gestured toward the screen in triumph.

  “So what’s it for?” Opal asked.

  Opal was a few years older than Sally and had been a steady friend. Sally ad
mired how open Opal had been with her own witchy pursuits. She never hid her activities from her parents the way Sally had—the way Sally still did. Opal had even done a class project worth fifty-percent of her semester grade on the intersection between Neopagan practice and environmental watershed management. And she’d gotten an A-minus.

  For her own project, Sally doubted that she could just jot down the Wiccan Rede—An it harm none, do what ye will—and be done with it.

  Sally wasn’t Wiccan herself, and the last thing she wanted was to spark a heated classroom discussion about the mutual non-exclusivity of witchcraft, Wicca, and other forms of Paganism—assuming Professor Ball even cared about such a distinction.

  More importantly, the eight-word Rede wouldn’t come close to filling the 1800 words required for her paper.

  Sally shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said to her laptop’s camera. “I’ll figure it out.”

  Opal yawned and tucked her dark hair behind her ears.

  “Just don’t count on magick to do it for you,” Saga smirked.

  “Very funny,” Sally groaned. Magick was a sore subject. Frigga had forbidden Sally from bringing her runes or even her wand with her to Ireland. It had been explained to Sally that she needed to continue to develop her innate gifts without reliance on tools, but Sally knew she was being punished—she was still paying for secreting a collection of Køjer Devil scales out of Norway.

  “Hey, I offered to smuggle some Tarot cards to you,” Saga replied. “If your roommate won’t let you use hers.”

  “You’re just pushing all sorts of buttons today,” Sally bit back, but she couldn’t keep from smiling at the playful dig. “And I’m still waiting on some useful advice, Opal.”

  The image on the screen froze for a moment, capturing her friend in mid-shrug. “Just don’t pull your usual witchier-than-thou routine and you should be fine.” The video crackled, then popped back to real-time.

  “You know I’m not like that anymore,” Sally said.

  “So you’re just keeping quiet, then.” Opal leaned closer to the camera in Portland. “I know it’s hard, but it’s only for a couple of months, right? Won’t Trinity let you switch roommates between semesters?”

  Sally certainly hoped so. “You know, mostly, it’s not so bad. But then Clare will go off on one of her magickal mystery sprees, and it’s all I can do to keep from throttling her.” Sally sighed.

  “A little birdie tells me that somebody is progressing quite nicely with her own lessons at the Lodge.” Bonnie Radcliffe swept into the frame and rested her hands on Opal’s shoulders. Sally laughed as Saga rolled her eyes.

  “A little birdie?” Saga asked with raised eyebrows. “Don’t let my brother hear you calling him that. Those are fighting words between Thor and Freyr.”

  Bonnie smiled. She was Saga and Opal’s manager at Powells, and she was also dating Saga’s brother. “Thor likes it when I tease him. Which reminds me . . .” She pushed her face toward the camera, obliterating Sally’s view of Opal and Saga. “Sally, do you think you could bring back some kind of little toy hammer, like a leprechaun would use? I think Thor would get a kick out of that.”

  Saga dragged Bonnie back out of the frame. “From you, Bonnie, sure. He’d love it. If anyone else tried giving him something like that . . .”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Sally offered. She tried to hide her jealousy over the personal attention Frigga was giving Opal in Sally’s absence. Opal was a gifted witch in her own right and like Bonnie had been one of the Einherjar at the Battle of the White Oak two years earlier. But Sally wondered if Opal’s lessons at Odin’s Lodge were another element of Sally’s punishment.

  “Now, ladies,” Bonnie clasped her hands together and glanced at Opal and Saga. “Sorry to break up the party, but we’ve got seven boxes of the new Kubal Browning book waiting to be unpacked.”

  “We’ll talk again soon, Sally. Just take it easy on Clare—and yourself.” Opal got up from her chair and shuffled out of frame.

  “Bye, Sally!” Bonnie sang out as she walked off. “Saga, are you coming?”

  The curly-haired goddess leaned toward the camera. “I think I need to get a new job.”

  Sally frowned. “I thought you loved working at Powells.”

  “I did. I do,” Saga corrected herself. “I mean, even after Bonnie found out who I really was, she still treated me the same, which was great. But now she and my brother are getting really serious.”

  “Do you need a personal invitation?” Bonnie called from some distance away.

  Saga lowered her voice to a whisper. “Now she’s acting, I don’t know, like she’s my stepmother or something.” She sighed. “Anyway, good seeing you, Sally. Don’t be a stranger.”

  Saga reached for the computer keyboard and disconnected the video call before Sally could respond.

  There was a loud thump in the next room, followed by some unintelligible cursing. Sally resisted the temptation to crack open her door to make sure Clare hadn’t set the curtains ablaze or conjured up some broccoli demon from her own tortured subconscious.

  Sally may have been trying to give herself a year away from all things witchy, but destiny—or was it fate?—was determined to shove it right back in her face.

  Sally looked down at her backpack resting on the floor by her desk. If she was trying to be responsible, she should at least catch up with her biology and economics reading if she wasn’t going to make a serious stab at her paper.

  “Why isn’t this working?!” Clare cursed again on the other side of the door. Sally sighed. Even if Clare was completely misguided, at least she was spending her Friday night entertaining herself.

  Sally switched off the overhead light and pulled her biology textbook out of her bag. She carried it over to her narrow bed, turned on her bedside lamp, and curled up to read about the anatomy of human lungs.

  3

  Sally awoke with a start. Something was wrong.

  She lifted her head from the pages of her biology textbook and realized she’d been dreaming about a parade of gigantic alveoli dancing across the Trinity College campus like the enchanted brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Except that the alveoli had been leaping and spinning to Fleetwood Mac’s Gypsy.

  Sally cursed her roommate’s never-ending stream of witchy music and ran her fingers along her cheeks to check for indentations from her textbook.

  She switched off her bedside lamp and was about to surrender to real sleep when she remembered that it wasn’t her dream that had awakened her.

  Sally extended her senses into the darkness, trying to make out the shape or sound of any unwelcome presence, then she sniffed the air for Clare’s magickal incenses. Nothing.

  Sally sighed. She wanted to be angry with Clare for her headstrong insistence that she knew exactly what she was doing and that no one had any business offering advice or assistance. Despite Clare’s bluster about her magickal credentials and experience, the young Texan hadn’t opened her own eyes wide enough to see Sally for who she was.

  That irked Sally. Maybe she did like being the Moon Witch?

  Sally groaned at her self-inflicted angst. She hated to be a teenage cliché.

  Sally pushed her textbook to the floor, rested her head on her pillow, and closed her eyes. She imagined sleeping in on Saturday morning and maybe heading to the pub to catch some live music and a tasty brunch. Or maybe she’d finally pay a visit to the archaeology treasures in the National Museum of Ireland.

  She drifted off, her mind filled with images of Viking artifacts, when a loud THUMP from the sitting room beyond her bedroom door grabbed her attention. Sally sat up again and heard the familiar tinkling of Clare’s crystal candlesticks colliding with one another, followed by some rustling of paper and fabric.

  Sally swung her legs over the side of her bed and sneaked across the floor. She opened the door just a crack and peeked out.

  Someone was shuffling around in the dark, but Sally couldn’t see anything. She opened
the door wider and stuck her head into the room just as Clare opened the door to the outer hall and left the apartment.

  Sally glanced at the clock on her nightstand. 11:37 p.m.

  “Oh, crap,” Sally whispered to the darkness. She flipped on her bedroom’s overhead light and reached under her bed for her shoes. No doubt Clare was headed straight for Dublin Castle. She was always going on about the importance of midnight—the “witching hour.” It didn’t matter to Clare that time was a human construct or that her penchant for the mysterious didn’t take into account time zones or Daylight Savings Time.

  Clare stayed up later every night than was good for her or her grades to light candles and wave her wand around at midnight. And now she was off to do the same behind the castle’s locked gates, and probably land herself in an Irish jail.

  Sally laced up her sneakers and pulled on a warm sweater. She shoved a flashlight into her jacket pocket and made for the door. Instinctively, she felt for her talisman—the smoky quartz pendant inscribed with the raido rune that she wore around her neck. It was safe beneath her sweater’s neckline. Sally stepped into the hallway and locked the door.

  She hustled through the hall and down the stairwell. Clare had a good seven minutes’ lead. The Trinity campus quads were full of students, some loners shuffling to and from the libraries while laughing groups stumbled together across the grass. It was even more crowded on the city streets just outside the campus gates. Trinity was barely a hop across the street from Temple Bar where tourists and locals alike spent untold hours in a string of pubs getting drunk and drunker still while listening to traditional musicians, watching televised sports, and scarfing down baskets of fish and chips.

  Sally dodged several drunken college students as they meandered into Dame Street and were nearly run down by a bus. Not half-a-block later, she pushed through a congregation of rowdy Russians standing on the pavement as they tried to make sense of The Bank bar’s posted dinner menu.

  She looked up and down every narrow street she passed. If her roommate was taking this same route to Dublin Castle, Sally didn’t see her.