For a time, she called herself Rose Franksdottir. Then the witch-twisting of her mind began.
She talked to herself first. She heard voices, and hallucinated creatures that did not walk among the elves—gods with the heads of jackals or birds or gators, she said, though all of us were sure she had a pipeline into Egyptian mythos.
She took books, journals and other writing materials, crystals, metals, clay, animals—anything and everything she found—into her house. Mostly, she stole. Objects went in, and Rose rarely came out.
My memories of many of those years after the war weren’t well-formed. Many times, I considered another attempt at suicide by witch, since I had so graciously brought a witch into Alfheim. But I could not do that to my Rose, nor could I do that to the elves who, at the time, were trying to help her.
They would have killed her the moment she set foot in town if she’d come in with a mundane. But it had been my hand she held, so the elves held her hand, too.
I’d been drinking the night her house burned. It takes considerable amounts of high-proof liquor to have an effect on me, and at the time, I’d been doing my best to figure out how much and how fast I needed to consume in order to black out.
I remember the screams more than anything else. The animals, the elves, the house, Rose. I remember the flames and I remember being as paralyzed by the heat and the brightness as I was behind the café.
Rose had enchanted the house. No elf could come close then, and they couldn’t now.
Only me.
I had stood on the edge of the magic circling her small cottage and watched a good-if-tormented soul burn. I watched the chaos of her mind become the chaos of her world. She died in that blaze. Rose became dust.
Now, I walked the garden path around my cabin to my lake-facing deck, and glanced at the wide French doors of my home. Rose had loved my cabin. She’d loved the lake, though she’d refused to leave her hill in her last few years.
Hammers echoed across the water. The neighbor’s workers were finishing up for the day. I closed my eyes.
I carried more than elven magic. I carried Rose magic, too. Wispy magic so faint the elves paid no heed. Magic I could only see if I squinted.
It was, in its own way, another kind of ghost. Rose’s imprint on my soul was the vestigial remains of my lone, failed attempt at building my own family. I shook my head and opened my eyes. The sun set behind the neighbor’s glass and chrome behemoth and all the colors of Samhain danced in its windows. The workers by the shore laughed. Others drove home to their families.
Marcus Aurelius nuzzled my hand.
“Hey,” I said, and rubbed his ear. He never liked my moods.
Neither did I. Two hundred years past the rage of my undignified re-birth and I still had difficulty regulating my emotions.
My dogs never judged.
I looked toward the forest-side of my house and Lizzy’s cairn while I rubbed my hound’s ears. “I am confused, my canine emperor,” I grumbled. “I don’t like being confused.”
He whined and sat on my foot.
How could I not smile? “You do Lizzy proud, my friend.”
Marcus Aurelius barked and padded off toward the French doors.
Why had I not yet found some comprehension of the day’s events? What, exactly, were we mixing up here in Alfheim? At least Akeyla was safe.
I opened Rose’s book one last time, as the sun dropped toward the horizon, wondering if it would reveal its secrets at the point of the sun’s crossings.
Nothing. Only blank pages. I re-wrapped it and returned it to its place in my truck’s toolbox. A part of me said not to bring it into my home. The rest of me agreed.
Rose had been eight when I brought her to town. For about a decade after her death, I’d see her dancing in the woods as if the fire had burned away what ailed her. Her ghost had realigned itself to the universe and my dear Rose had found peace.
Her phantom never varied. She twirled and she smiled, and she held out her hand. Then she vanished into whatever magic from whence she’d come.
That echo of Rose had bounced that way through my life for ten years, until she became too faint and finally evaporated for good. All that remained was the ashes of her house and her wisps in my soul.
The neighbor’s unholy saws screeched across the lake. The cacophony provided some usefulness—it pulled my mind from my past “lessons” and drove away all thoughts of demons, fatherly, witchy, or otherwise.
Time to attend to the present.
Today’s crew looked to have installed solar shingles. At least my noisy neighbors were environmentally conscious.
My phone rang.
Maura, my phone’s screen said. She was probably calling to tell me that Akeyla would be spending the night at Arne’s. I answered.
“I…” she said, then sniffled.
“Maura?” Was she hurt worse than she let on at the café? Was Akeyla hurt? And I hadn’t helped. I ran when the fire became too hot.
“Frank,” she sniffled again. “I just wanted to say that you will always be my big brother.”
Maura had been born while I was experimenting with a college life in the sixties. She’d been a child about the same age as Akeyla when I returned to Alfheim.
She’d been my joy. Her smile, like her daughter’s, helped me search for something beyond the darker moments of my life.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Those two tourists at the café? The two outside?”
Oh, no, I thought. I should have gone after them. I should have hit them with tracers so that Arne or Dag could track them down and take their phones.
But I didn’t. I let Maura down. I let Arne down. Damn it, I let Akeyla down. And now video of elven magic was free in the world.
“Mom’s taking care of it,” she said.
Part of me felt sorry for the two tourists.
“There are rules, Frank,” Maura said.
Yes, there were rules. Rules that protected the entire community. Rules that kept all of us safe while allowing Alfheim to continue to grow. Rules that applied to everyone, royalty or not.
That did not mean I had to like it.
“Akeyla needs guidance with her fire abilities,” Maura said. She sounded as if she was attempting to convince herself more than me. “We’re going back to Hawaii.”
“You left for a reason,” I said. Growled, actually. I’d seen the damage to her magic. The heat her ex had added.
She’d finally healed.
“Did you see anything at the café, Frank? Any other magic?”
“Other than the ghost?” I’d told Ed about my father and I was sure that Arne knew.
“Yes.” She all but whispered.
Had I? “I don’t know,” I said. Though I should know.
“Akeyla didn’t start that fire,” she said.
All evidence pointed toward the opposite, and now the two tourists had video proof.
It all seemed too… clean.
“No,” I said. “No, she didn’t.”
Clean and geometrical.
“We…” Maura sighed. “It’s decided.”
How the hell could it be decided? She was the Elf Princess of Alfheim. Didn’t that count for something? What about Akeyla? Why had Arne made his decision so quickly? “Maura…”
“I gotta go. We’ll be by to pack tomorrow.” She sighed again, this time to cover a hiccup.
Was Arne really sending his daughter away? “I’ll talk to your father. I’ll leave now.” I had to. Someone had to talk sense into Arne Odinsson.
“It’s been decided. There’s nothing you can do.”
“I don’t care.”
“Frank…”
“Maura, it’s the least I can do. Let me do this. Please.”
After a pause, she answered. “Okay. Thank you.”
She ended the call. I stared at my phone. Should I call Arne? My gut told me no. Better to stand face-to-face with Alfheim’s King. But I needed information.
“I’m in my office,” she said, and hung up.
I tucked my phone into my pocket. Time for me to walk into that fire.
Chapter 9
Alfheim’s City Administrative Complex—the elves refuse to call anything other than their Great Hall a “hall”—was a well-landscaped sprawling line of concrete and brick bunkers on the edge of town. Built in the early nineties during one of Minnesota’s better municipal funding periods, the Admin Complex housed all of the city’s mundane functions: police, fire, city and county officials, community center, main library, and the local county courthouse. We even had a kids’ indoor playground, a gym, and a pool.
I parked my truck toward the back of the lot and away from the main admin building, and left Marcus Aurelius to his guard duty. Time for me to speak to the one elf in Alfheim capable of blocking Maura and Akeyla’s banishment: Maura’s mother, Dagrun Tyrsdottir.
My truck clicked and groaned as it cooled. I stared at the building, my body also clicking and groaning. My neck hurt. My back knotted. My fingers ached.
My demi-health crept up on me while my mind circled other thoughts and now decided to remind me that even though I was as immortal as the more powerful of the elves, I would never be as agile or alive. I unclenched my hands and slowly shook out the stiffness.
The world spun.
Right there on the concrete walk to the doors of the Admin Building, out in the open, my demi-health and my uncertainty whipped up a bout of vertigo.
For a second, a tornado touched down in my head and my life’s geometry became arcs and curves. My life folded back onto itself. Responses I’d left behind—anger and vengeance that boiled over into a red, roiling rage—lifted up out of the holes in my soul. My arteries constricted and made my heart thump. My vision closed into a tunnel.
I knew this unsettled rage. My body remembered each time it broke through and inflicted itself onto the world: My father’s attempts to destroy me. The Confederate soldiers who raped and murdered. Rose, at her and for her. The laughter of the mundanes. Each and every death of every one of my dogs.
My hauntings included more than ghosts.
I gulped in air and looked up at the early evening sky. Count, I thought. Breathe.
Trees rustled. Somewhere close by, a crow cawed. Warmth wafted up from the concrete under my feet. Cars moved in and around the lots, as did their exhaust.
I was not alone, no matter how lonely my thoughts made me. The world buzzed in the here and now.
A car honked. A young mother on the other side of the lot herded her children toward the community center.
The rage vanished. I inhaled deeply and slowly, and carefully exhaled.
Every day, I practiced attending to my body and my functions. I warmed myself in the sun and I drank my tea. I lived a quiet life with no place—or need—for rage. So why had it surfaced?
I shook my head and blinked.
A crow jumped from a tree near the building to the roof. It bobbed its head and spread its wings, and cawed again. Then it lifted its beak to the sky as if to say that the Aesir wanted me to pay attention.
“Which are you?” I asked. Huginn or Muninn, Odin’s ravens of thought and memory, though this bird was neither Odin’s nor a raven.
The crow cackled and stomped its bird foot. Then it too took wing toward the sunset.
I watched it fly off. Was it an omen? Warning? A bird entertained by the foibles of mundanes and magicals alike? Because if I was going to be laughed at by an animal, it would be a crow.
I shook my head. The best I could do now was to make my way toward Mayor Tyrsdottir’s utilitarian outer office. Maura and Akeyla took precedent.
The reception desk for the entire town governance office sat behind a fish bowl of a glass wall and looked out over a boring hallway through which other office staff walked. Behind the receptionist and around a corner, Dag’s office door was closed.
Dag was in there; magic filtered out around the jamb and along the carpet.
Dag’s office manager looked up from her computer. Sue Martenson was a mundane who had married into the Alfheim Werewolf Pack and understood the true nature of magicals.
“Hi, Sue,” I said.
She frowned, then nodded.
“Mr. Victorsson, how are ya today?” she said in her thick Northern Minnesota accent. The entire pack other than Gerard and Remy referred to me as Mr. Victorsson. I never did figure out why.
“Good, good. The sun’s out, yeah? No rain coming.” I said. You had to follow the social rules in Alfheim, which meant starting a conversation with mild pleasantries about the weather. I learned long ago that if you did not acknowledge everyone’s greater environment, it was assumed that you didn’t care about the community. Such a faux pas opened a person to a storm of Minnesota Ice instead of the usual, happy Minnesota Nice.
Sue smiled.
“I need to talk to Dag.”
The smile vanished. “She’s on a call.”
Yells echoed from her office. Sue nodded toward the door just as a bubble of magic pushed through the wood frame.
Dag was not happy.
Emotions were contagious. What if Dag’s anger swirled up the rage again?
No, I would not be held prisoner by my own faults. I waved to Sue and walked around the reception desk. Sue made no move to argue or to stop me, though I suspected that if I had been a regular mundane, she would have told me to take a seat.
I knocked.
“I know it’s you, Frank,” Dag called.
Dagrun Tyrsdottir sat on the edge of her grand oak desk, one elegant leg dangling over the edge. She’d fully dropped her glamour.
The cell phone in her hand cast a flat, bluish shadow over her almond-shaped eyes and her exquisite, straight nose.
Like her husband, Dagrun Tyrsdottir’s magic swirled around her like silk caught in a breeze, and like all elves, she was beautiful in ways no mundane person could match. The enchantment tattoos circling her scalp just above her ears flowed over onto her forehead and formed a shimmering semi-cornet of silver and gray-blue which, like my own tattoos, danced just off her skin like a heat mirage.
The tracer tattoos on the back of her hands and up the inside of her forearms shimmered in the same way, as did the silver and pewter clasped into her long, seemingly-alive, earth-black ponytail.
Dag’s tracer enchantments appeared more solid than the ones I carried—the ones she’d gifted me in the decades after I returned from the Civil War with Rose in tow.
Rose was why Dag had gifted me the tracer enchantments. Rose was also the reason for the protection sigils around my scalp. I’d long resisted elven markings. The tattoos were visible to mundanes, and only added to my perceived scariness. I got enough stares as it was.
But I conceded after Rose. Best to be protected from witches.
Dag, like Arne, rarely dropped her glamour outside of the elves’ Great Hall, the glamoured elf-space where they could walk free without worrying about mundane eyes. But today, she paced Alfheim’s Mayor’s Office in full elf splendor, right down to her linen tunic, leather pants, and thigh-high, black, built-for-running boots. Her long bow and quiver leaned against the wall between the two windows.
Dag looked ready for a hunt.
She ran her finger over the edge of her grand, pristine oak desk, then looked at the tip as if she’d picked up sludge off a sea monster. Then she held out the phone.
“Watch,” she said.
I took the phone and tapped the triangle to start the video.
The two tourists sat at the table in front of Lara’s window. Most of the footage was them gossiping about women they knew in The Cities and making fun of their small town coffee. They caught Maura and Akeyla entering the café, and made predictably boorish comments about Maura. The one shooting decided to continue filming her through the window, and to continue his loutish voice-over.
The final fifteen seco
nds of the video was by far the most problematic.
Inside the café, Akeyla brightened. She stiffened, and her glamour popped like a balloon. Maura gasped and covered her daughter’s ears, but she was too late. Akeyla’s ears were clearly elven. Clearly pointed.
Maura’s compensation produced visible distortions around her daughter. Magic visible to not only me, but to anyone watching the video.
The owner of the phone swore as the magic around Akeyla caught fire. He swore again and ran away just before the window exploded.
Dag stared at the back of the phone. “That call you heard when you came in?” She looked up.
I nodded.
“Maura’s grandfather.”
My gut clenched. Tyr Bragisson was the King of the Icelandic elves, and Dag’s father. His call meant that the video had already gone international, and explained the swiftness of Arne’s decision. If the other elf enclaves demanded action, Arne had little choice. “How many views?” I asked.
Dag closed her eyes. “Not many, thank Odin,” she said. “My husband coordinated a takedown.” She put out her hand to take back the phone. “We’re still looking for the two who posted it.”
I paced across the room, doing my best to not seem imposing, even though Dag had never—would never—read my body language as threatening. She was my adoptive mother, and knew me well.
Other than the massive oak desk, the Mayor’s Office was a utilitarian shell complete with metal shelving and flickering fluorescent lights. The walls were the beige of old snow—that crusty, slightly lichen-filled color of desolate landscapes that humans should leave alone. The rows of shelves along the inner wall only reflected light where they’d been nicked down to their aluminum frames, and were otherwise the dark grey of volcanic rocks.
The office might seem bland to a mundane’s eyes, but to me, it conjured images of Dag’s homeland, Iceland.
From Dag’s pacing, I wondered how protected Maura was at the moment. Dag stopped in front of one of the windows, still fully out of her glamour.
I pointed, but didn’t say anything.
She flicked her finger over the blinds and they snapped closed. “Has Arne told you what happened the last time the mundanes caught an uncontrolled glimpse of an elf’s power?”
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