“And an easel. We’ll need to go to an art supply store for that. I can’t take the one I have at school off campus.”
“Okay. Where’s Tor anyway?”
Tor answered the question by walking around the side of the house. “Sorry,” he called out. “I left my phone upstairs and had to get it.”
Billy was staring slack-mouthed at Tor’s face. Tor grinned at him, then winced, because moving the muscles in his face pulled at the bandages.
“What in hell did you do to yourself this time?” Billy said.
“Nothing,” Tor said. “A spirit bear did it for me.”
Billy rolled his eyes heavenward. “Let’s just go get what Maya needs,” he said. “And there better not be any angry spirits at the art supply place.”
Getting everything I wanted took a couple of trips. The size and weight of a real artist’s easel, made out of solid redwood, not flimsy aluminum, shocked Billy and Tor. It took both of them to wrestle the flat pack into the Land Rover and then out again once we got it home. While they hauled the easel inside, I unloaded a couple of the lighter flat packs and leaned them up against the car.
“Shall I help you?” The voice came from right behind me.
I yelped and turned around to find the Frost Giant kid grinning at me.
“You came back?” I said.
“Yes. I wished to see you.”
“Well, here I am. Still no elixir, though.”
“That is too bad.” He glanced around. “I have been sent to ask. Where is the vitki?”
“Inside with a friend of his, but they’ll be right back.”
He turned and looked at the front door just as it opened. Billy came out, stopped, and stared. “Whoa! Who the hell is that?”
“Ah, there is the friend! Now I shall go.”
The kid vanished.
Billy trotted over to me, his normally I-live-in-front-of-my-computer pale face even paler. “Was there really someone here?”
“Yep,” I said, “a Frost Giant. Just a young one, though.”
“Jesus! Sometimes hanging out with Tor—the things you see can take years off a guy’s life.”
“What made you believe in his sorcery, anyway?”
“The things I saw that took years off my life.” Billy gave me a grin, then hefted one of the flat packs. “Now we get to put all this stuff together. Tor’s useless at that, by the way.”
“Good thing I’m not.”
Reinforcements arrived about ten minutes later when JJ and Aaron drove up in JJ’s old gray heap, a Honda that had seen better days. Both of them had to hear about the bear spirit and Tor’s cut face before we all got down to work. Aaron, a tall, skinny dude with a mop of curly brown hair, worked for a software company doing something arcane with security measures. He also, it turned out, loved three dimensional puzzles. Although his serious Asperger’s kept him from understanding other people at times, Ikea directions presented no problems. He got the elaborate storage unit together faster than I thought possible and started on the work table. Billy and JJ assembled the easel while I finished the bookcase. Tor supervised by bringing down a cooler full of bottled beer.
We were standing around in my newly furnished studio when Tor’s phone rang. He set his beer down on the work table and answered it. His eyes widened in surprise as the person on the other end identified himself.
“Thank you, sir,” Tor said. “It’s good of you to call.”
Tor hurried out of the room and down the hall to the library to finish his conversation. Billy raised an eyebrow in JJ’s direction.
JJ shrugged. “No idea, man.”
While Tor continued talking in the other room, I unwrapped the protective padding from my canvas and set it on the easel. We had enough time to fetch the boxes of paints and other supplies from the Land Rover before Tor finally returned. He slipped his phone into his jeans pocket and picked up his bottle of beer.
“That was my faculty advisor,” Tor said. “You guys remember him.”
“The crusty old dude, yeah,” Billy said.
“What was all that about?” JJ asked.
“My uncle’s death. The cops were at Cal, checking out my history. They wanted to know if I’m really a spoiled rich kid or some kind of drug dealer. They’d need a warrant to get into my bank records, and I guess they’re not ready for a step like that.”
“Fuck!” JJ shook his head in disbelief. “What is this? They think you killed him?”
“Oh yeah. I’m the one he tried to shoot. Pretty obvious candidate for the guy who might have shot back. Except he wasn’t shot, of course. They don’t know what killed him.”
“Then why are they so fucking sure he was murdered?” Billy said.
“Because he was found dead in the middle of a parking lot miles from his apartment and his car. Can’t be muggers, or they’d have cleaned out his wallet. He was carrying three hundred bucks in cash.”
Aaron took off his glasses and wiped them on the hem of his tee shirt. He frowned, nodding to himself, as he thought things through. He looked up and put the glasses back on.
“Tor?” Aaron said. “Did you kill him?”
“No,” Tor said. “To my eternal regret, I didn’t.”
“Do you know who did?”
Tor sighed. I knew he was thinking of his vow. “Yeah,” Tor said. “I do.”
Aaron gave him one of his horizontal straight-line smiles. “Who was it?”
“Hey!” Billy stepped forward and laid a gentle hand on Aaron’s arm. “Enough.”
“Hey yourself! I’m just curious.”
An odd thought occurred to me—test out the truth. “I did,” I said. “I killed him.”
JJ muttered something I couldn’t quite hear, then laughed under his breath. Billy grinned.
Aaron blinked at me. “Ah,” he said eventually. “A joke.”
“Don’t let it bug you.” Tor raised his beer bottle in my direction like a toast. “She’s got a weird sense of humor.”
“Aaron, look,” JJ said. “What if the cops came around to ask us questions? Like, do we know who killed the wicked uncle? Suppose it’s someone we know. Would you want to tell them the truth?”
“Oh!” Aaron beamed at him. “I get it. We don’t want to know.”
“Good man.” JJ rummaged in the cooler. “Have another beer!”
“Thanks.” Aaron took the bottle from him. “I could have a look at their site. See what they’re thinking.”
“Whoa!” Tor said. “That’s dangerous, hacking into police files.”
“Only dangerous if I get caught.” Aaron paused for a swallow of beer. “And I won’t.”
“Up to you, dude,” Tor said. “Sure, I want to know, but hey, these are the cops.”
“Yeah. So?” Aaron paused for another horizontal grin. “I’ve got a polymorphic trojan all set up on an auxiliary box.”
Billy choked on his beer, which I took as meaning he actually understood what Aaron had said. The rest of us tried to look as if we did. While Billy coughed, Aaron took out his smartphone and accessed the police department’s public website.
“Can you get in?” Billy said.
“They’ve got all kinds of citizen access built right onto the site,” Aaron said. “Email for all kinds of things. Port 25 will be up and running real soon now.”
“Uh, look,” Tor broke in. “I don’t want you to get into any trouble.”
“There won’t be any trouble.”
Aaron and Tor had a lot in common sometimes.
Although Tor offered to take everyone out to dinner, the guys begged off and left soon after. Tor saw them to their cars, then came back, lugging an old wooden kitchen chair. He placed it in a corner of the studio and sat down to watch me as I unpacked and stowed away my painting supplies.
“You didn’t tell me,” I said, “that the cops suspect you killed Nils.”
“I figured you knew. I’m the logical choice. That’s why you could confess six times over, and they wouldn’t bel
ieve you. They’d think you were trying to protect me out of a pure woman’s devotion. All women are self-sacrificing angels, aren’t you?”
“How much beer have you had, anyway?”
“Only one. I’m just naturally sentimental about pure womanhood.”
“Oh yeah sure! I thought the cops were after Valdez and that other buddy of Roman’s.”
“I bet they’re on the list, too. Right behind me. Or maybe tied for first.”
I concentrated on loading jars of acrylic into drawers. Had my deep wound of guilt made me blind? Apparently so. I’d convinced myself that the police suspected me when all the time, it was Tor they were after. At the worst, in their eyes I’d be a clue leading back to him. They might wonder, for instance, if Nils had assaulted me and Tor wanted revenge. Another ugly thought clawed at my mind.
“What if they want a swab of my DNA?” I said. “You know, from my cheek. Because of that bite.”
“They won’t. I made sure of that.”
I spun around to stare at him. He smiled blandly back.
“Tor—”
“I cast an aversion spell over you. And a couple of wards. Do you remember when they barged in to interrogate Roman at the hospital? They never even looked your way. If I keep refining the spell, they might even forget who you are. That’s what I’m working toward.”
“I—“ I groped for words. “I guess I should thank you. But—”
Tor got up, smiling, and walked over to me. “I keep telling you, Maya, I’m a barbarian. I don’t give a shit about due process of law. You’re mine, and that comes first with me. I intend to keep you safe. No matter what it takes. Okay?”
“Not if it lands you in jail instead of me.”
“It won’t. I might have helped him along his way when I broke his wrist, but I didn’t kill him. I wish I had.”
“Tor, how can you say that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“Because I’d be off the hook that way?”
“That, too, but basically, because I hated his guts.”
He was standing with his thumbs tucked into his leather belt, his head thrown a little back, watching me with a small smile. Barbarian. Oh yes, I saw it, all right. I saw something else, that the cold, lawless side of him attracted me sexually even as it frightened me. Half-way between Björn and Audo, I thought. For a moment he seemed to be waiting for me to make a comment; then he shrugged. He laid his hands on either side of my face and kissed me open-mouthed.
“Okay?” he said.
“Okay.”
I felt more frightened than reassured, but he kissed me again before I could say anything more. Élan oozed from the cut on his cheek. He smelled like sweat and beer, a raw male scent that turned me into the female animal in heat. I reached up and pulled him down for another kiss. His hands slid down to my buttocks, and he pressed me against him.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he whispered.
We never made it that far. In a corner of the library room was a sagging old couch, narrow, awkward, but good enough because it was close to hand. I stepped out of my jeans and panties and flopped down on the cushions. I had to keep one foot on the floor to leave room for him to kneel between my legs. He slid his jeans halfway down, far enough, because neither of us could wait any longer. A few thrusts, and I climaxed, sobbing under him, just as he came.
He rolled off to kneel beside the couch and rest his upper body against me. I stroked his hair and listened as his breathing slowed back to a normal rhythm. With a sharp sigh he lifted his head, smiled at me, and stood up, wincing a little.
“Shit, my back!” he said. “This is worse than the back seat of a car.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Oh yeah? How do you know?”
“Huh! How do you know? I don’t suppose we’ve got any tissues.”
He pulled off his tee shirt and delicately dropped it onto my stomach. “Might as well use that.”
I cleaned up while he pulled up his jeans. We made ourselves just decent enough to get upstairs, where we showered and changed our clothes. Once we were respectable again, we went out for dinner like normal people.
One of Tor’s favorite restaurants lived in an old Victorian house on Berkeley’s Gourmet Row. No, not Chez Panisse, although this place owed a lot to them as a model. When we arrived without reservations, the hostess seated us immediately at a primo table in a bay window, which told me how much money Tor must have spent there in the past. White linen, nice china, comfortable chairs, and a view of a garden—perfectly lovely until Tor looked around the dining room and muttered “oh shit!” under his breath.
I followed his glance and saw a couple seated at a table across the room in an alcove. The young woman was gorgeous, tall, with auburn hair, perfect features, perfect make-up, modest kelly green dress—real silk as far as I could tell. The man, some thirty years older, had gray hair, streaked with a little red, and wore a gray business suit. She glanced our way, noticed us, and did a classic double-take.
“Old girlfriend?” I said.
“Yeah.” Tor picked up the menu.
“That her dad?”
“Yeah.” He opened the menu and raised it to hide his face.
I took the hint, shut up, and opened my own. When we ordered, the waiter took the menus away and left Tor with no place to hide. While we ate our first couple of courses, I noticed the O.G. across the room glancing our way now and then while she and her dad worked their way through the wine list with their meal. For a change, Tor restricted himself to one glass of white wine, which told me he anticipated a Scene, so I did the same.
The Scene, however, arrived in the women’s restroom. To reach it I had to pass by the O.G.’s table. I’d just gotten inside the clean, well-lit anteroom when she followed me in. I could smell the wine practically oozing from her pores.
“So,” she said, “you’re Tor’s latest, are you? Lucky old you!”
I felt like slapping her, but a girl fight in a public toilet struck me as a totally awful way to spend an evening. I smiled and said nothing.
She set her hands on her hips and glared at me. “Is he still a major nutcase?”
I had to say something. “I wouldn’t call him that.”
“You will. Trust me, you will! He looks so good at first, doesn’t he? But just wait till he starts talking about the runes and all that crap.”
By then I really had to pee. I darted into one of the stalls and locked the door. I was hoping she’d just go away, but when I finished and came out again, she was still standing by the marble-topped vanity.
“What is it you really want to say?” I said. “Did he dump you?”
Her turn to stay silent. I washed up while she watched me. I got a couple of paper towels from a wicker basket and began drying my hands.
“Well, what is it?” I said. “Why did you follow me in here?”
“I don’t know.” Her mouth trembled. “I think I wanted to warn you. Sorry.”
“Warn me or cause trouble for him?”
That made her cry. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I threw the towels into the waste bin and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the vanity. When I offered her the wad, she took it and dabbed at her tears.
“Did he dump you?” I said again.
“No.” Her voice sounded thick with wine and frustration both. “I dumped him. I had to, I just had to. But it hurt.”
“Did you really love him?”
“No. Well, kind of. A crush, I guess. I never really liked sex, y’know, until—“ She blushed so deeply that her dusting of freckles showed through her make-up. “But god, he’s crazy! All that sorcery crap. Have you heard his rant yet?”
“Uh, yes. It sounds real to me.”
“You believe it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s lucky you guys found each other.” She clutched the tissues tighter and stared at me. “Where did you meet him? In a therapy group?”
Before I could answ
er, she turned and fled with a clatter of high heels on the tile floor. The door slammed behind her. I waited for a minute or two before I left the restroom. By then she was sitting with her dad again and wiping her smeared eye make-up on a white linen napkin. Tor had moved his chair and place setting around so he could sit with his back toward her. When I sat back down, he stared at his empty plate.
“Well, that was interesting,” I said.
Tor raised his head and looked at me. “It ended pretty badly. The time I spent with her, I mean.”
“I gathered that.”
He winced.
“Y’know,” I said, “you’re not as big a monster as you think you are, if that bothers you.”
“Thanks. I guess. I felt shamed. That I didn’t handle it better.”
“Shamed?” I stared at him.
He shrugged the question away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough.”
I hadn’t told him about my previous boyfriends, either. I concentrated on cleaning up the perfect wine sauce with the last few bites of my pork medallions. I did notice that the O.G. and her father were getting up to leave. When I relayed the news, Tor turned tense, but they swept by us and out without saying anything. He relaxed with a long sigh of relief and ordered more wine.
When we returned home, I changed into my painting jeans and an old tee shirt and went downstairs to gloat over my new studio. I hadn’t planned on working in the artificial light, but studying the landscape canvas made me wonder where I was going to place the image of the corpse. Acrylic provides a good surface for the indecisive. I picked up a stick of natural charcoal and sketched in the shape. Fail! I wiped it off with a rag and tried another placement. Still wrong. I removed the sketch, then put the rag and the charcoal down on the work table.
Wait till morning, I decided, but I lingered, staring at the canvas. Where on the long sweep of snow had Mia found him? The memory image had become faint and fuzzy in my mind. I retained a word memory, the knowledge of what I’d remembered, rather than a clear picture. Where exactly had he been lying? I concentrated on the faint image, tried to clarify it, augment it so I could find the proper spot.
I felt a chill and crossed my arms over my chest so I could rub them. That damn air conditioning again, I thought. Tor kept it up high no matter how big the electric bill was. A cold breeze lifted my hair away from my face. I looked over my shoulder at the vent for the heat and air conditioning—down at floor level, and closed. I turned back and found that the painting, the frame and the easel, that is, had disappeared. I shivered, because I was standing in snow up to mid-calf with the long slope rising before me. Dawn touched the distant peaks with pink light.