“Okay,” Tor said. “There’s some firewood in the back of the garage. I’ll go get it.”
The downstairs hearth stood in the library room, not Tor’s workroom with the consecrated cirle. Tor built a tidy stack of wood in the hearth and laid in some scrunched-up junk mail for tinder. Before he lit it, he sat back on his heels on the hearth rug and considered his handiwork.
“Think that’s enough wood?” he said.
“The portraits are canvas covered in oil paint and varnish. They should burn like crazy.”
“Okay.” Tor got up and glanced around. “I’ve got a fire extinguisher. Let me get that.”
Tor rummaged around in a cupboard in the kitchen of the lower flat and brought out the fire extinguisher. He set it down near the fireplace.
“Okay.” He took a box of long matches from the mantel. “Let me just light this, and then we’ll bring the old bastard out.”
The junk mail caught, some wood splinters with it, and then the bark along the thick chunks of dry wood. When Tor went to fetch one of the portraits, I realized with a clench of my stomach that we were about to burn a witch—not exactly alive, but close enough. I stepped back from the fire and refused to look at the canvas when Tor took it out of the green bag.
“That’s right.” He said, misunderstanding. “Don’t let him look you in the eye.”
Without a second’s hesitation Tor walked over and set the picture, face to the wall, directly into the crackling flames. The fire went out, stone cold out, with nothing more than twist of black smoke and a waft of the smell of charred wood.
“You bastard!” Tor knelt down, struck a second match, and tried to light the remaining junk mail. The match blew out. Tor pulled the portrait out of the fireplace and set it face-down on the concrete slab in front of the hearth.
“All right, you,” Tor was talking to the painting. He said something in Icelandic, then got to his feet. “Maya, shut the drapes over the big window, will you?” He picked up the portrait in one hand. “Join me at the circle.” He strode through the bookcases and disappeared into his workroom.
I did what he asked. When I walked into the other room, I saw that he’d lain the portrait face-down in the center of the ritual circle, right at the point where the two arms of the equal-armed cross met. He still wore his ordinary jeans and Raiders t-shirt, but he was holding his rune knife in his right hand.
“Sit in the north,” he said. “I’m not going to evoke the runes, because he can feed on them just like I can.”
I took my place between the outer edge of the circle and the wall. Tor knelt beside the portrait and raised the knife. Before he could lower it, he gasped and choked with a grunting sound like a boxer hit in the stomach. His arm trembled and bent as he arm-wrestled his invisible opponent. For a long few minutes they fought. I could see Tor’s arm begin to move the knife downward, then spring back up again as his opponent pushed it back. Björn—Halvar—I couldn’t see, but I knew by the coldness in the air that a presence struggled to win this match. This second duel—the first time, back in that other life, Björn had won.
Tor set his mouth in a scowl and swayed backwards, just a few inches. The tension in his arm eased. He barked out one word and plunged the knife down in the center of the stretched canvas. A voice, barely human, shrieked aloud. Tor yanked the knife hard toward him. Despite the layers of paint and varnish the canvas ripped all the way to the frame. Tor raised the knife again and slashed the painting from corner to corner.
“He’s gone,” Tor said, “but I bet he’s back in that damn drawer.”
Tor got up and stalked into the huge closet where he kept the safe and the drawers in question. I was afraid to move. I saw just a trace of motion above the ripped portrait, a gray curl like a wisp of smoke.
“Tor!” I said. “What—”
The wisp disappeared. Tor came back, carrying another portrait, and he was staggering and panting as if it weighed a thousand pounds. One slow step at a time, but at last he reached the circle and threw the painting face-down next to the mangled remains of the first one. Tor barked out three words in a language I didn’t recognize. He stood for a few seconds, breathing hard, then stepped into the circle and knelt down. When he raised the knife, I saw the wisp of gray forming above the first canvas. Tor snarled a word. The wisp thickened, rose up, and dove into the second painting even though Tor called out the galdr again.
“Magda!” Bjorn’s voice begged in my mind. “Help me!”
“No!” I screamed aloud. “I hate you!”
Tor brought the knife down and plunged it into the second portrait. He ripped it, he stabbed it, he slashed it, over and over until at last nothing but a tangled mess of painted ribbons sat in the middle of the empty frame. He got to his feet, staggered a little, then strode out of the circle and returned to the drawer.
The last portrait was just a portrait. Tor carried it in with no trouble, cut it a couple of times with no trouble, and let it lie. He sat back on his heels and panted for breath while he looked at the shreds and the scraps still clinging to the stretcher bars of the second portrait. He smiled, a grim tight berserk grin, and laughed a little, a barely audible chortle. Red blood dripped from the blade of the rune knife. It neither repelled or attracted me. It was just blood.
“You cut yourself,” I said.
“No.” Tor’s voice was perfectly mild. “This isn’t my blood. It’s a manifestation.” He turned the crazed grin my way and chortled again. His eyes were cold, unblinking, almost blind, as if he hardly knew where he was.
“Tor,” I said, “do you know who I am?”
“Of course. Your name is Maya Cantescu, and I’ll love you forever. I’m not possessed.”
“What’s my mother’s first name?”
“Kusuma. It means flower.”
“And what’s my middle name?”
“Lila.” He looked puzzled, then smiled, a weary twitch of his mouth. “I’m still me.”
“Yeah. I know that now. I just had to make sure.”
He nodded to show he understood. He glanced at the mess of canvas scraps and the red knife. “I’ve killed a kinsman. The worst dishonor of all.” His shoulders slumped, and a trickle of tears ran down his face.
I wanted to run screaming out of that room. I wanted to hold him and comfort him. Caught between the two I just sat there and trembled. That day I realized why I fought so hard against my own talents.
Magic is terrifying when it’s real.
Chapter 6
“I don’t understand what happened,” I said. “What was that gray stuff that came out of the portrait?”
“Ectoplasm.” Tor paused for a smile. “An old word, but it’ll do. Think of it as whipped élan. Etheric mayonnaise.”
“Too weird!”
“The whole thing is weird. Also wyrd.”
I ignored the pun. We’d come upstairs to the living room after cleaning up the ritual space downstairs. After the battle to banish Halvar, I’d felt nothing but numb relief, but now my mind was working again.
“Usually I respond when there’s élan close by,” I said. “But if anything, it creeped me out.”
“You hated him, right? Of course it repelled you.”
“And then the blood on the knife—I didn’t feel any élan.”
“It didn’t have any, that’s why. It was a manifestation. Dead man’s blood. It sucks up life force, which is probably why Halvar brought it through. Tried to weaken me with it. ”
That’s when I remembered the picture of the island and the red lion.
“Something I meant to tell you,” I said. “On the barometer, I saw a red lion. That means power flowing, right?”
“Right.”
“But as I watched it, it slowly turned green, like someone was draining it.”
“Was that before or after I drew the runes on you?”
“Before.”
“Then it was Halvar. He couldn’t act directly, not even with his poltergeist, so he got a claw into
you. Shit, I’m glad he’s dead now! Too much longer, and he might have gotten control over you.”
I turned icy cold and felt the room jerk suddenly to one side. I sat down on the couch fast before I collapsed.
“I’m right here.” Tor sat down next to me and caught my hands in his. “What’s wrong?”
“I was just so scared for a minute.” I took a deep breath. “Thinking about what might have happened if you’d lost. The thought of being in his power again.” I shook my head and trembled.
“Well, you won’t be. And neither will I.” Tor gently let go of my hands. “He was into controlling people. He wanted to use my mother as a medium. Maybe for sex as well. That’s the main reason my dad left the family lands. Halvar had plans, and my mother wanted nothing to do with them.” He smiled. “Halvar couldn’t admit it, though. It was all left unsaid, nothing but hints and significant looks. You know, like an Ingmar Bergman movie. So the old bastard had to let us go.” He stopped smiling and shrugged. “My dad told me about this just before he died.”
“God, how awful.” It wasn’t much of a thing to say, but I felt too exhausted for eloquence. “I’m just so glad you won.”
“No, we won. When you told him you hated him, he—well, it was like he looked away. Got distracted, just for a couple of seconds, but it was enough to let me get the upper hand.”
“He can’t have loved me that much.”
“Oh yeah, he did. I bet he wanted to hang around because of you.” Tor’s voice tightened in anger. “I guess we could call it love, anyway. He wanted possession. He was obsessed, maybe, is more like it.”
I slumped down on the soft cushions and rested my head on the back of the sofa. “He’s gone, isn’t he? I mean, really gone on to wherever souls go. So he can’t come back.”
“I think so. Liv figured he’d have to go, if I could pry him out of his hole.”
“But you don’t know it? I mean, really know it?”
“No, not for one hundred per cent certain. Look, this is another reason why you’ve got to stop running from who you are. You need to be able to defend yourself.”
I sat up to face him and gathered my breath. “Okay,” I said. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Tor smiled, but thank the gods, he didn’t launch into one of his smug lectures. He patted my hand, then got up and went into the kitchen. He came back with a bottle of dark beer for him and a snifter with a splash of brandy for me. He handed me the glass and sat down again.
“I hope Liv calls soon,” he said. “She told me she would. I bet she’s already sensed that—” he put an ironic twist on the words, “—that the matter’s settled.”
Was it? I felt a cold knot of wondering near my heart. Yet Tor would know how things stood, wouldn’t he? So I nodded my agreement and had a sip of brandy. I stared into the glass, just without thinking, while I swirled the golden-brown liquid around. In the moving fluid an image began to form: runes, but ones I couldn’t recognize. I looked away fast. Tor was watching me.
“You saw something,” he said.
“Shapes like runes, but they weren’t the runes I know. I feel like my mind’s got holes in it, and things can creep in.”
“Holes or open doors?”
“Both, probably. I think it’s spillover from what just happened with the portraits, the power, I mean.”
“Maybe that’s it, yeah. We’ve got to be more careful from now on. Your talents are coming online, all right, but in a kind of dangerous way. Unorganized, I guess I mean.”
“I wish I could talk with your sister.”
“That’s a good idea. You can email her.”
“I don’t know any Icelandic.”
“She speaks English. She was raised here in California same as I was. I just like to speak the old country language with her so I don’t forget it.”
Tor’s phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket, glanced at the caller ID, and laughed. “Right on schedule,” he said and clicked the phone on. “Hi, Liv? Did you know we were talking about you?”
I could just hear her laugh and answer yes, her ears were burning. They lapsed into Icelandic once they started discussing the spirit battle. Both of them laughed a lot, but out of relief, not joking around. My mother and I had laughed the same way when we’d just barely escaped a car crash. A drunk driver ran a red light, she’d swerved just in time, and we’d sat in the parked car and giggled hysterically for maybe five minutes. Liv and Tor laughed with the same desperate edge.
Eventually they calmed down. From Tor’s serious voice, from the way he spoke in clipped sentences, sure she’d understand, and his occasional nods of agreement, just as if she could see him, I could imagine them as siblings, heads together as they discussed some important event or decision. It was a good twenty minutes before Tor handed me the phone.
“She wants to talk to you,” he said.
I liked Liv’s voice, a pleasant alto, and sure enough, her English sounded like she’d left California the day before. She wasted no time on pleasantries.
“The brother tells me you have image magic,” Liv said. “If you want to be an artist, you’ve got to get control of it right now. Otherwise it’ll take you over and drive you to drink or drugs. Maybe even total psychosis like Richard Dad. The only way you can escape is to never draw or paint again.”
“That would drive me crazy even faster,” I said.
“Okay, then. Email me. The phone service in my little part of the island is ridiculously bad when it comes to connecting to the Internet. I only go into town once a week, but I’ll do what I can to help. I don’t really understand my own magics. They’re what are called wild talents. I thought I was the only one in the family, but Halvar must have had some knowledge of them, the nasty old creep! I’ve lived with them for years, and that’s taught me a few things.”
“Anything you can tell me will help. I’ve been so frightened.”
“I don’t blame you. When a wild talent hits you, it’s like a slap in the soul. Look, I’ve got to hang up and get back to the house. But email me. I always take my laptop into town when I go, and I’ll answer.”
“I will, for sure.”
“Good. Oh, and congratulations! I don’t know why anyone would want to marry my brother, but as long as you’re happy.”
“I feel the same way about mine.”
We snickered in unison.
“Mom and I will come to the wedding,” Liv said. “Set it for early summer, okay? Otherwise we could be snowed in.”
“I will. And thank you so much for your help. I’ll email you as soon as I can think straight.”
“Do that. Bye!”
I handed the phone back to Tor. He clicked it off and put it back in his pocket, then picked up his beer again.
“Feel better?” he said.
“Weirdly enough, I do. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that all this magic is real. Maybe that’s just as well. I can just put it to one side that way and go on with school and life and stuff.”
“The trouble is, you can’t keep putting it to one side.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
Tor gave me a normal smile and finished the last of his beer. I also knew that he was right. That evening I sent Liv a long email describing what had happened with my art after I’d moved in with Tor.
For some days, while I waited for her answer, I managed to keep my talent in the margins and pretend I had a normal life. The battle had left both of us exhausted, Tor more than me, of course. We did a lot of normal things with our normal friends—went to a movie with Cynthia and Jim, visited my brother and Brittany in the hospital, went to the local park so Tor could play basketball with his guy friends, Billy, Aaron, and JJ. Tor cooked a couple of really fancy dinners to let the planning and work ground him, he told me, in what he called physical plane matters. I probably gained a pound each, but they were worth it.
I worried continually about the police, but we heard nothing from them. The jötnar, however, were another
matter. One morning when I was leaving for campus, I found symbols painted on the garage door. I got out my smartphone and called Tor.
“Come down and look at this,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“In the driveway.”
“Why didn’t you just yell?”
“I was raised in apartments. It was so hard finding rentals that would take kids. My parents totally drilled us in not disturbing the neighbors. Y’know, like by yelling.”
He sighed and clicked off. While I waited for him, I examined the sloppy, distorted runes more carefully. Red ochre, and a real earth pigment, at that, coarsely ground and mixed with some kind of animal skin glue—the gritty paint had dripped and hardened unevenly on the metal panel of the door.
“What the hell?” Tor came up beside me. “Oh great! A misspelled curse!”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not really, but I’ll remove it, anyway. Whoever wrote it tried to curse our wagons so the wheels fall off and the harnesses break.”
“They don’t understand cars, do they?”
“No. Has to be jötnar work. I guess we’re at the graffiti stage of the feud.”
“You don’t seem real worried about this.”
“I’m not, as long as they’re trying to work magic. When the battle axes come out, then I’ll worry.”
Somehow I didn’t find this reassuring.
By the time I got home, Tor had neutralized the curse and scraped the runes off the garage door. The paint left an ugly stain on the panel, though, that bothered me every time I saw it.
During those days, I also kept drawing, but I only did sketches of the life around me and studies of landscape details for my school project. I avoided the mysterious talent that revealed things other people couldn’t see or things I didn’t know I knew. The talent caught up with me when Liv answered my email.
Liv had so much to tell me that she ended up attaching a PDF file to a short note. I read the material through three times. I felt as if she’d thrown me a lifeline when I didn’t even know I was drowning. I saved it, of course. My subconscious mind took her final piece of advice particularly seriously, “Make sure you start working with your dreams. Don’t ignore them.”