Sorcerer's Feud

  “Does it hurt?” I said.

  “Not much, no.” Tor held out his hand. “I’ve been thinking. Y’know, I don’t want to go on living with a fucking poltergeist. I don’t want to keep carving up the flat to ward it off, either. I’ve got an idea about this dead vitki. Who he is, and if I’m right, I’ve been overlooking the obvious.”

  Since it wasn’t obvious to me, I concentrated on patching up Tor’s hand. Once I got the cuts bandaged, we cleaned up the broken glass from the floor and the counter. By the time we finished, Tor had a grimly satisfied smile. He’d been thinking, all right.

  “Come downstairs with me,” he said. “If you’re game. I want to get a portrait out of Halvar’s coffin.”

  It finally dawned on me. “He was a vitki when he was alive.”

  “Sure was.” Tor gave me a smile of approval. “And I wonder if he still is.”

  Tor went downstairs first to banish the wards he’d set. By the time I came down, he’d taken a portrait out of the drawer and set it up on the lectern. Together we stood in front of it and looked it over. I studied the technique, impeccable though so old-fashioned, painted in oils and then varnished. The eyes caught my attention, held my attention. I couldn’t look away as the image shimmered and changed into a face I remembered all too well. The same eyes, the same scowl, but his hair was dark, and he wore mutton-chop whiskers.

  “Björn.” I whispered the name aloud.

  For the briefest of moments the portrait smiled, the icy smile of the hunter who spots his prey. Tor barked out one word in Icelandic. The smile disappeared. I wrenched my gaze away.

  “Maya,” Tor said, “go upstairs! Fast! Before he tries that again.”

  I ran for the stairs and started up. I glanced back once to see Tor shoving the portrait back into its green cloth bag. For a moment I thought I heard laughter—not Tor’s laughter, but Björn’s. He’d made that same cold howling sound when he’d told me my lover was dead. I ran the rest of the way upstairs and stood panting in the living room by the fireplace, where the runes would keep me safe.

  Tor came up directly after me. “So,” he said, “I’m more glad than ever that the old bastard’s dead. Halvar, I mean, but Björn, too.”

  “Did you see the face change?”

  “Oh yeah. And I saw what he was trying to do. Take you over. Capture your will and make you obey him.”

  “How could he—“

  “I don’t know, but I bet Liv does. She made that writing desk, didn’t she?” He grinned, a gesture that left his eyes cold. “Now I know where she got that particular talent. Image magic, I guess we can call it. She must have inherited it.”

  “What are you going to do? With the portraits, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I wish I could talk with her about it, but I got an email from her yesterday. That means she won’t be going back into town for another lousy week.” He paused, then gave me a normal smile. “Unless—I just got an idea. Come into your bedroom with me.”

  For a minute I wondered if he wanted to try a sexual rite again, but when we walked into the Burne-Jones bedroom he sat down in the green armchair facing the writing desk. He motioned me over to stand next to him. The alchemical barometer displayed an elaborate picture of an oak tree. On one side of the tree an armed knight pinned a huge snake to the trunk with his sword. On the other, a second knight stabbed a king.

  “I might need to borrow some of your energy,” Tor said. “I’ll try not to.”

  “Okay. Should I touch you?”

  “Only if I ask. Then put your hand on my shoulder.”

  Tor leaned forward and put his own hands flat on the writing desk. The picture abruptly changed to a smooth black void surrounded by a circle of red lions. Tor’s mouth twitched in a brief smile. For some minutes Tor stared into the void without moving, barely breathing, it seemed, while I stood ready beside him. Slowly images began to form in the black void, fragments of the snake, fragments of the king and the tree, until one piece at a time the original image had reappeared. Tor lifted his hands off the desk and sat back with a long, exhausted sigh.

  “Well, shit,” he said. “I don’t know if anything you could call a message got there. I’ll send her email for back-up. But it gave me an idea. I wonder what would happen if I laid hands on the portraits and concentrated? Like I just did with the desk, I mean.”

  “No!” I practically screamed at him. “It’d be too dangerous.”

  Tor turned in the chair and quirked an eyebrow at me. I got the distinct impression that he was fighting to keep from smiling.

  “I don’t know how I know,” I said. “But I do.”

  He did grin, then. “Okay,” he said. “I bet you know a lot more about image magic than you think you do. I wanted to see if I could make you admit it.”

  I felt like slapping him, just because he looked so smug. Tor crossed his arms over his chest and waited with an infuriating little smile.

  “Oh lay off!” I snapped at him. “I’m tired of you always pushing on me. Why won’t you just hang it up?“

  “Because I want you to be my equal.”

  I found myself caught with an open mouth and nothing to say.

  “Well, come on!” Tor said. “I’ve got the money to make your life easier. You need me to feed you élan. You’re part of my household, and I’ll take care of you as long as you want me to. It’s all fine with me. But what happens when you get tired of feeling like a patient in a clinic? Or a pet?”

  I went on staring without a word at my disposal.

  “You’ll leave me, that’s what.” Tor’s voice softened, became quiet. “And I’ll fall apart. and when I put myself back together, I’ll just be the cold kind of half-dead bastard who feels nothing but contempt for the whole fucked-up human race. And I don’t want to turn into a monster.” He forced out a twisted smile. “I’m too close to that already.”

  I took a deep breath and got my brain back online. “Okay,” I said. “I get it. You’re right. I don’t want to be anybody’s pet cat.”

  “Good.”

  “But you’re not a monster.”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Tor! I don’t fall in love with monsters.”

  His smile changed into something warm. I’d call it grateful, but with Tor, that might be going too far. I wanted to say something normal—well, as normal as anything could be between us. “How long do you think it’ll be before you hear from your sister?”

  “Depends on when she goes into town.” Tor got up and stretched before he continued. “I don’t know why she wants to live way the hell out there. The farm’s on the east side of the island. Not a lot of people around.”

  “The isolation’s probably why, with your family talents to hide. I mean, most Icelanders are normal people, aren’t they?”

  “Very.” He grinned again. “Which is one reason my father moved to California. Here, we fit right in.”

  “Fit right in? You got to be kidding.”

  “Yeah? Think about it. You, Brittany, the occult bookstores, the tarot card readers, the occult lodges down in L.A. and San Fran, your dad, the—”

  “Okay, okay, I see what you mean.”

  We walked into the living room together. I sat down on the couch, but Tor paused at the fireplace. He laid a finger on the long crack in the sandstone slab.

  “We’re going to have to get rid of him,” Tor said, “one way or another. I need to figure out how to do the right banishing ceremony.”

  “Can’t you just send him on, like you were going to do with Nils?”

  Tor turned around. His eyes had gone wide, and his mouth looked oddly slack. “I don’t know if I can,” he said. “Maybe he’s half-dead now, but when he was alive, he was one strong son-of-a-bitch. And if I tried and failed—” He let his voice fade into silence.

  “What? What would happen?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I might end up as the soul living in those pictures. And he’d be the man in this body.”

 
I nearly vomited. The sensation grabbed my stomach, rose with an acid burn in my throat, and made me gasp for breath with the pain. Tor took a step toward me, but I got up and ran down the hall to the bathroom. I hadn’t eaten enough that day to let go and hurl, but I drank glass after glass of water until the last of the acid got driven back into my stomach where it belonged. In the mirror I could see my face, beaded with sweat. I turned away from the sink and found Tor standing in the doorway.

  “You okay now?” he said.

  “Yeah. It was just the idea of him being you, or you being gone, and him touching me again.” I shuddered.

  “He had that effect on people even when he was still alive.” Tor managed to smile, a weary twitch of his mouth.

  I realized that I was seeing something I’d never seen before: Tor afraid. I began to tremble.

  “Let’s get out of the house,” Tor said. “Go for a drive in the sunshine.”

  “Good idea. I’d like that.”

  We ended up having dinner out, too, then stopped by Cynthia and Jim’s apartment for a little while. We came back to house about ten at night, and neither of us wanted to go anywhere near Tor’s workshop and the portraits. Tor took a bottle of beer out of the fridge, looked at it for a few seconds, then put it back unopened.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” he said and grinned at me.

  “Huh! I bet I can guess what is is.”

  He confirmed my guess by striding over and catching me by the shoulders for a kiss. As we walked to the bedroom, I was unbuttoning my blouse, hurrying to take it off and unzip my jeans. He pulled his shirt over his head, caught me again, and picked up me up to dump me onto the bed. That night our passion for each other felt like a drug, as if I’d gulped down a big glass of brandy on an empty stomach, and now the alcohol was spreading through my entire body until I could no longer think, only feel what Tor was doing to me. The pleasure so close to pain drove all the fear out of my body.

  Afterwards we fell asleep, but I woke about an hour later. The drug had worn off. Despite the wards downstairs and the runes all over the upstairs, I was worried enough about Björn’s presence, his spirit living in the paintings, that I found it hard to get back to sleep. I couldn’t think of him as Halvar, Tor’s grandfather. To me he’d always be Björn, the man who’d murdered my lover, who’d driven me to suicide. I remembered him as the captain of a whaling ship, and I knew enough about whaling that all those deaths sickened me, too, intelligent animals, speared, bound to the side of the ship, cut up while they were still alive, in agony as the salt sea lapped into their wounds. Brutal, horrible, all the things he’d done, monstrous actions from a monster.

  Yet in his way Björn had loved Magda, the girl I’d been back then.

  I suddenly saw it. At the time, as I crept around our house after Kristjan’s death, and when we’d gone to our little island for a “holiday”, I thought that Björn had only been defending his honor, that he’d hated Kristjan for taking something Björn thought of as his property. But that night in California, while I thought I was still awake, I heard Björn’s voice speaking English, “I loved you because you were so vital. You made me feel alive. You made me understand magic. You made me crave magic.”

  I sat up in bed and screamed. Tor woke with a grunt and sat up next to me.

  “What?” he said.

  “Someone’s in the room!” I was sure of it, suddenly, that Björn stood in the shadowed corner.

  Tor reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. No one was there. The runes cut into the molding, rusty with paint and Tor’s blood, gleamed in the golden light.

  “Couldn’t have been,” he said, yawning. “Were you dreaming?”

  “Yeah, I must have been. I heard him talking.”

  “Shit! If he can reach your dreams, we’ve got a problem.” Tor got out of bed and stretched. “What did he say to you?”

  Already the dream memory was breaking up into a murmur of disconnected words. “He said I made him feel—I don’t know—he understood magic or something. Like I gave it to him, the understanding.”

  Tor picked up his jeans from the floor and put them on before he spoke. “I can remember that Magda had a magical aura around her. Seeing her, it felt like coming into a warm room out of the snow. Even when I was Kristjan I felt it, and I was a dull guy, a lawyer, pillar of the Lutheran church, all that crap until I met her. Loving her, I changed, like down to my soul.” He hesitated for a long moment. “Did he change?”

  “Björn was brutal. He killed for his living. I don’t remember him being anything else, that last couple of months. He—” The memory stabbed me. “He raped me. I mean, it wasn’t legally rape then, because we were married, but every night he threw me on the bed, and he was furious, and I ended up bruised all over.”

  Tor went deadly still. His face showed no emotion, except for a muscle under his left eye that twitched repeatedly.

  “That’s why I drowned myself,” I said.

  He nodded and took a deep breath. The twitching stopped. “I wonder how long he lived after you died?” he said. “I bet he didn’t have another life between him and Halvar. Or I should say, that his spirit didn’t incarnate in between the two. They were too much alike.”

  I shrugged to show I had no idea.

  “I wonder,” Tor continued, “if you changed both of us. Kristjan didn’t give a damn about magic. Lars—that’s me the next time around—did. Maybe that’s why I remembered you so clearly when I was reborn. That’s probably why I was thinking of you when I was dying in the snow, after the Nazis shot me. Your magic could have marked both of us. Magic? No, it had to be your nature. Who you were. Who you still are, that half-human spirit.”

  “But Magda didn’t need to steal élan. She wasn’t a vampire. That deviant DNA, it has to be something from my dad in this life. She can’t have belonged to Niflheim.”

  Tor gave a little grunt of surprise. He sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “I just realized that,” I said. “Okay, yeah, I do need to remember more of what happened.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to say ‘in past lives.’ “Before now, I mean.”

  He nodded and looked away, thinking. Finally he said, “Well, back to the old drawing board! I thought I had it all figured out, but I don’t. I was wrong.”

  “I never thought I’d hear you say that.”

  He laughed. “Okay, I deserved that. I need to think about all this, Maya. Sort it out for both of us. But right now let’s do something to keep him out of your mind. I want to draw some symbols on your forehead.” He thought for a moment. “I think I’ll draw them on your chest, too. Why take chances?”

  “Bindrunes?”

  “Not exactly. They’re from a tradition called stave spells.”

  I’d left my backpack in the living room. I got a calligraphy felt-tip and returned to the bedroom. Tor sat me down on the edge of the bed in the pool of light from the lamp and got to work. The two patterns of runes took him a long time to draw, and he chanted spells, too, while he did. When he finished, I got up and looked at myself in the mirror in his bathroom. I was expecting a tight, beautiful design like on the pendant he’d made for me earlier that summer, but this figure looked strange and ungainly. A circle had five lines emerging from it, three on top, two on the bottom. Different little squiggles crested each one. Well, I guess they were magical symbols, but they looked like squiggles. In the center lay five dots and the Hagalaz rune, basically an H.

  “That stuff in the center represents Halvar,” Tor told me. “The other lines will suck in any force he sends to you and direct it right back to him. He won’t like it.”

  Strange-looking or not, the magical patterns worked. When we went back to bed, I felt totally safe. I drifted right off and slept straight through till morning.

  I was having breakfast, and Tor was drinking his second cup of coffee, when the cellphone in his shirt pocket howled. I yelped. He took the phone out, glanced at the caller ID, and grinned as he answered it. When he spoke in
Icelandic, I figured that Liv had gotten the message. Tor glanced my way.

  “She knew something was wrong,” he said, “and drove over the hill so she could pick up her wireless access.”

  “Say hi for me.” Inane, yes, but I wanted to acknowledge the woman who was going to be my sister-in-law.

  I listened to his side of the conversation, not that I understood any of it. I could see him growing grimmer and grimmer, hovering on the edge of anger. At one point Liv yelled at him loudly enough for me to hear her voice, all strange and tinny over the distant connection. Tor winced and answered, suddenly meek. They spoke normally after that.

  Finally he clicked off. He sighed once and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  “She’s right, of course,” Tor said to me. “I’ve got to destroy the paintings. Like, right now.”

  “What else did you want to do?”

  “See if I could learn something from the old bastard. Evoke him and make him speak to me. But Liv’s right, it’s too dangerous.” He shrugged. “Who knows, he’d probably only lie to me, anyway.”

  I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. “He’s really alive in the paintings, then?”

  “Kind of alive. Kind of dead. Not really either, but waiting his chance to come alive. Nils had no way of knowing I already owned two of them. I bet he gave me his to let Halvar carry on the feud for him. A little revenge.”

  “So if you destroy them, Björn, I mean Halvar, he’ll be gone?”

  “We hope so. Neither of us really know what to do. Liv burned her copy last year, she told me. She had a dream telling her to. So the ones I have are his last hope.”

  I felt the urge to vomit again. I choked it back and ran into the bathroom for water. Tor followed me. He studied my face.

  “The staves are still there,” I said. “I didn’t want to wash them off this morning.”

  “Yeah, they don’t look smeared or anything. I’d tell you just stay away till I’m done, but it’s too dangerous. He could come after you.”

  “I wondered about that. Besides, I have to know what happens.” I have to know if you’re still you at the end of this, is what I was thinking.