Outside the wind had picked up. It whistled around the mound and made me yelp and shudder. I stared down the dark tunnel that led to the place of bones. Tor laughed at me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Eventually I sealed it off, cleaned the place up astrally. But anyway, when we first got here, every time I tried to leave, the bear would block my way. Physically, that is—she stood across the doorway. I tried talking to her. Ordered her to move. She never growled or threatened. She just stayed where she was.”
“That’s a lot of ugly bear fat to shove aside, yeah.”
He ignored my nasty crack. “I kept testing the wards. They didn’t prevent really primitive magicks, like the priests here would have used. So I transformed.” He smiled, just faintly. “I became a cave bear. I can really transform, here. I became the bjarki. It hurt like hell, but once I did it, I was bigger than she was. So she couldn’t stop me. She didn’t even try, just crept aside when I growled. Once I got outside, I could work. I changed back to human and cast galdrar against the wards until they shattered.”
“How did she take that?”
“She was furious. I thought I’d have to transform again to fight her off, but all at once she crumpled. Fell to the ground, writhed, barely managed to crawl back in here. That was your doing. Right?”
It was an accusation, not a guess. “I suppose so,” I said. “Why didn’t you just come home then?”
“For a very simple reason. Sweetheart, I was worn out. I came back in and got dressed and fell asleep. I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday, remember. When I woke up, I cast the staves. Help was coming, they told me. I expanded the reading, and it seemed pretty clear that you were the help they meant. I didn’t want to play hide and seek across the worlds. Y’know, I leave, you can’t find me. I come back, but you’ve left, and so on.”
“Oh my god, yeah, that would have been horrible.”
“Besides, I couldn’t leave her like this.” He gestured at the bear. “She knows now who’s in charge. Both of us, that’s who. Not just me, but you, too.” He gave me a soulful look. “Maya, please, tell me what you did.”
“You finally said the magic word.”
“What?”
“Please.” I reached into the backpack and took out the sketchbook. “But if I release her, is she going to try to savage me?”
“Not with me here, she won’t.” Tor rose to a kneel and turned to look in the bear’s direction. He caught her gaze, then spoke in Old Norse for a couple of quick sentences. She moaned and scrabbled with her front paws. The motion made her head jerk alarmingly. “She’ll behave,” he said to me. “She knows she’ll die if she remains stuck like this.”
“How can she die? I thought she was only a spirit bear.”
“We happen to be in the spirit world. Or haven’t you figured that out yet?”
I was shocked enough to stare open-mouthed. “It feels real to me,” I said at last.
“It is real, just not in the way ours is. Real after another manner, the occultists would say.” Tor paused to pull the backpack over to him. “Its atoms are built of another kind of energy, basically. Matter’s only an illusion, anyway, even in our world. It’s just a real stubborn one back home.”
He found a candy bar and sat back on his heels to strip off the wrapping. I flipped through the sketchbook while I tried to assimilate what he’d just said. I found the page with my drawing of the chained bear, tore it out of the book, and held it out. The bear whimpered and writhed in such pain that I began to feel sorry for her. Tor wiped the chocolate off his fingers onto his jeans and took the drawing. The bear fell silent.
“Shit,” he said. “No wonder! I don’t suppose you can just erase those chains.”
“It’s Conté. It doesn’t erase.”
“Okay.” He got up, then squatted by his parka. He felt in the pockets and brought out his rune knife. “Let’s see how delicate I can be.”
Tor laid the backpack flat on the ground and used it as a table of sorts. He set down the drawing, chanted a galdr, and held the rune knife up. A shimmer of runes flashed along the blade, Jera, Berkano, and Ánsuz. Carefully, slowly, he brought the knife down and with the tip cut through the paper and the drawing of the chain that bound her head to her forepaws. With a jerk of her head she whimpered. She raised her head and shook it, swung it from side to side, lowered it, raised it again, but all the while she was staring at Tor in what I took as adoration.
He was studying the drawing and never noticed. I’d drawn the chain around her front paws when she—the bear in the drawing, that is—had been holding them a little apart. Tor had just enough space to cut the chain without nicking her actual feet. Once again she whimpered, but again, she could finally move freely. When she scrambled up, she showed me her teeth. I snatched the drawing from Tor and held it up. She closed her mouth and backed up fast.
Tor growled under his breath and snapped his fingers. She lay down again, but on her stomach, this time, and rested her head on her front paws to watch him.
“She’s totally yours, isn’t she?” I said.
“Now, yeah. I don’t know what to do about the collar.”
“It’s loose enough so it won’t choke her.”
“Yeah, but it’ll chafe. Catch on branches, too, in the forest.”
I was tempted to say “tough” again, but I held my tongue. Now and then the bear would look my way and whine, just softly under her breath, in what sounded like fear. I felt cruel for hurting her and a little guilty. Not very guilty, but enough to make me lighten up. I’d dominated her, and now she knew who was boss. I saw no reason to push things farther.
“Let’s see how tight the collar is,” I said.
I took the backpack and found the fruit I’d packed. When I held up an apple, the bear sniffed the air and turned her head in my direction.
“If I give her this, will she take my hand off like Fenrir did?”
“No, of course not. She knows you’re my mate.”
Still, I took no chances. I laid the apple down a couple of feet in front of her. “There you go.” I moved back. “That’s for you.”
She raised herself up, stretched out her neck, and snagged the apple. She crunched it a couple of times in her massive jaws and swallowed with no trouble. Tor found another apple and held it out. She nipped it with her front teeth and took it safely out of his hand.
“Whoa!” I said. “She really is tame.”
“Yeah. She’s finally learned. She won’t try to trap me again. Not here, not at home at the full moon. No more bjarki for me.”
“Oh my god! That’s wonderful. Do you mean you’re free of it?” I wanted to shout and dance in triumph, but he held up a hand for silence and chilled my mood.
“Maybe or maybe not,” he said. “Remember what I told you, that night, way back when I offered you a job? There’s always a catch. Every full moon I’m going to be vulnerable because of the virus. I might have to fight off every spirit who smells the power leak and takes their chance to attack. I just don’t know yet.”
I felt sick with disappointment. “You can’t tame all of them.”
“That’s where the bear comes in. She’ll fight them off. To protect me.” He smiled briefly. “Unless she can’t for some reason.”
Unless, he meant, she was caught by the collar somewhere in the spirit world or chafed raw and too angry to have anything to do with us.
“Okay, I understand.” I picked up the drawing again and studied it. “If you cut through the collar, will it cut her, too?
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Repercussion.”
“Will the wound heal okay?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes magical damage doesn’t. Look what happened to that guy in the Grail legends. The Fisher King.”
“That’s who I was thinking of, all right. Let’s see. Maybe if I weaken it she can throw it off.”
I’d drawn the collar as a simple band of some indeterminate substance, just a pair of roughly parallel lines
wrapping around her neck. I got my drawing materials out of the backpack. First I used an X-acto knife to remove as much of the Conté forming the collar as I could. Since I’d been so angry when I was drawing, the clay and wax base of the sticks had gone on thickly enough for me to lift some of the black lines off. The pigment, however, remained, a dark stain on the paper. I put the knife back and took out a stick of brown Conté.
“Let’s make it leather.” I glanced at Tor’s belt to get the texture right, then added color and a little stippling. “And sort of torn.”
The cuts Tor had made on the paper had mysteriously healed. In the drawing, the bear’s paws were free, and a length of chain dangled broken from her collar. At the place where the iron links touched the leather, I drew a deep tear, as if the weight of the chain had been too much for the collar itself. I looked up and noticed the bear watching me.
“Scratch,” I said. “Scratch at your neck.”
Tor repeated the words in Old Norse. I demonstrated by scratching at my own neck with my fingers closed into a paw. The bear hesitated, looking back and forth between us, then followed suit. I heard the chain fall onto the floor, a definite, real, indeniable jingle and clank even though I could see nothing lying on the stone. She tossed her head back and chuffed in what I hoped was delight. On the drawing the collar had disappeared. Ice slid down my back, the spirit ice that signaled powerful magicks, and these were mine.
“There,” I said. “She’s free.”
“Thank you. And I’m free with her.”
“It’s all good, then?” I smiled at him. “So you won’t care if I give the Frost Giants their gold back.”
“Hey! Unfair!”
“Oh come on! I risk my life to come find you, I help your bear girlfriend, and you won’t even open the safe for me when we get home?”
“Why do you care if they have it?”
“So they’ll leave us alone. Tor, c’mon! Do you want to fight with them for the next fifty years? They’re too stupid to stop trying to get it back. I don’t want to start our life together in the middle of a feud with Frost Giants.”
Tor opened his mouth, shut it again, glared at me, and crossed his arms over his chest. “We’ll discuss it when we get home.”
“How middle class of you.”
“Maya, damn it!”
“If we can get home.” I looked past the fire. “It’s a real storm out there.”
The firelight penetrated the night just far enough for us to see snow falling, thick, silent, fast, like ropes let down from heaven.
“Can you cast a gate in here?” I said.
“No, there’s not enough room for a ritual circle. You need space to clear off other influences, to make a neutral ground. I don’t think I can do that with all three of us crammed in here. Where’s the image gate you made?”
“Hanging in a tree near the giants’ steading. It was the only way in I had, the image of their awful farm. We don’t want to go back there, even when the storm’s over.”
“I guess we’ll just have to spend the night here.” Tor grinned and slid over next to me.
“Keep your hands to yourself! I’m not going to make love with you where that bear can watch.”
“She won’t care.”
“So what? I will.”
“I can make her turn over and stare at the wall.”
“Yuck! Not good enough!”
“Now who’s being middle class?”
“There are limits even with artists. Besides, we’d better stay on our guard. The Frost Giants are looking for you. The etinwife told me that.”
His grin vanished. “They won’t be able to find us in this storm, but yeah, we need to leave as soon as we can. Once we’re home, I’ll renew the wards around our house. I’m tired of them strolling down the driveway like they own the place.”
“Once we give them back their gold, they won’t have any reason to hang around.”
“Once we—I haven’t agreed to open the safe yet.”
I smiled and fluttered my eyelashes. He sighed.
“I suppose I will, sooner or later,” he said. “Yeah, the gold does attract them. Like dead meat and flies.”
I found a blank page in my sketchbook and picked up a piece of charcoal.
“Could you build up the fire a little?” I said. “I could use more light.”
“Okay. What are you going to draw?”
“Home.”
He smiled, a slow, sly grin. “Think it’ll work?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never used paper and pastels for this before, just paints and canvas.”
I started by making an image of the front of our house, but it stayed stubbornly dead, a sketch only. I turned the page and thought about my studio. I’d set up the room myself, I’d created both art and magic in it, and I could see it so clearly in my mind, its simple furniture in particle board brown, its gray walls. My easel stood where I’d left it and held the painted gate into Jötunheim. The window—I put in a view of the back yard. As I worked on the colored drawing, I felt the power flow.
Tor got up and began to gather our possessions together, the backpack, our parkas. His faith in my magic gave me faith in myself. I put in detail after detail, the drawer I’d left half-open, the jars of acrylic on the work table. The paper seemed to swell and billow under my fingers like the sail of a ship.
“What rune should I draw on it?” I said. “Thurisaz might hold us here.”
“Try Mannaz.”
Tor began to chant a galdr. As soon as I drew the rune, the image floated off the paper. It drifted to a chamber wall and hovered in the air as it grew larger and larger. I grabbed the sketchbook and the box of my drawing stuff and stood up. The bear scrambled to her feet and growled. She took one step toward the gate, but when I hissed and snarled at her, she backed off.
“He’ll bring you through when he needs you,” I said.
Tor let the chant fade away and spoke to the bear in Old Norse. She whimpered, but she lay down on the opposite side of the chamber, near the dying fire. Tor and I exchanged one glance, then strode forward together. As the gate enveloped us, I felt a cold touch of nausea like rocketing downhill in a rolling coaster. I took one more step, and the sensation vanished.
“You left the lights on,” Tor said.
We were standing in the middle of my studio. So my art tends toward illustration, does it? All that “unnecessary” detail, huh? Illustration has its uses.
I glanced out of the window. Night had fallen here in Oakland, too. Right in front of us stood my easel with the painting of the Frost Giants’ steading. That image glowed and throbbed with life, but the image I’d drawn in the mossy chamber had returned to the paper. I set my sketchbook and box of supplies down on the work table. Tor crowed with laughter, dropped the stuff he carried, and grabbed a charcoal stick. When he drew swift runes on the painted sky, the canvas returned to being a canvas with a hurried, sloppy farmscape in acrylics on its surface. He threw his arms around me and kissed me before I could say a word.
I took another kiss, then pushed him away. “You’re opening the safe,” I said. “Right now.”
“What is this? Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I don’t, but that’s not the issue. We don’t know when they’re going to give up looking for you there and come looking for you here. I want to have the gold so I can hand it over.”
“Shit, I hate to admit this. Yeah, you’re right. But!” He held up a hand and glared at me. “It’s your decision, not mine.”
“Fine. I’ll take the responsibility.”
I lingered in the studio while Tor went into the other room to work the combination of the safe. He came back in a couple of minutes with the shoebox. I opened it to make sure that the plaque was in it, then made him leave the room while I hid it in a drawer. We gathered up the backpack and parka and walked down the hall to the library room just as a car pulled up in the driveway. Someone got out and slammed the car door.
“I bet tha
t’s the cops,” Tor said.
Sure enough! The doorbell rang. We heard someone hurrying down the stairs from the upper flat and waited in the darkened room until we heard Lieutenant Hu’s voice.
“Uh, good evening, ma’am. I just wanted a few words with Mr. Thorlaksson.”
“Not here just now.” A fake Nordic accent colored Liv’s speech. She must have practiced it for hours. “I am sister. You are?”
We heard Hu sigh. I could imagine his martyred look at facing another damned Icelandic speaker.
“Liv?” Tor called out. “I’m here. Just came in the back door.”
We hurried to the stairwell and a much relieved Lieutenant Hu. Since she was a bare inch shorter than Tor, blonde and blue-eyed Liv towered over the cop. She was wearing jeans and a pale pink shirt with short sleeves that showed off her nicely muscled arms. A farmwoman, I thought, and she looked it, from her honey-colored bobbed hair to her heavy walking shoes.
“Sorry I’m not cleaned up,” Tor said to the lieutenant.
“Yeah,” I put in. “We spent the night camping over at Stinson.”
“Huh,” Liv said, still with her fake accent. “You both stink, yes. Old fish.”
Hu’s look of martyrdom intensified. “Just wanted to tell you some news,” he said. “The medical examiner agrees that a pre-leukemia condition likely contributed to your uncle’s death. We’re still not sure what happened, but it looks more and more like some degree of manslaughter rather than murder. Probably involuntary. Maybe even death by misadventure.”
“That’s good to know,” Tor said. “Any news of my cousin?”
“Not yet, no, but don’t worry. We’re working on it.”
Hu muttered good-bye and retreated from the smell of bear. The three of us waited until we heard him drive away. “Liv,” I said, “Pleased meet you. Literally.”
We all laughed, then hurried upstairs. Joel was waiting for us in the living room.
“Jesus,” he said. “What did you two do? Roll in carrion?”
“Close enough,” Tor said. “Me and Maya had better clean up. Then we need to figure out what you’re going to tell the cops.”