Sorcerer's Feud

  “Oh god, I hope they never find me,” I said. “He has to have messed up!”

  “Maybe you’re part Neanderthal.” Tor was smiling, but his eyes were narrow, a little distant. “Your dad was Romanian, right? Throwbacks still hanging on in the Carpathians?”

  “The analyst probably just picked up the genes for my rotten disease. I bet he’s never seen anything like it before.”

  “That must be it, sure.” Tor relaxed and gave me a normal smile.

  And yet I wondered. Something nagged at my mind, something my father had told me, a long time ago, something I couldn’t quite remember. I knew I’d have to work at recovering that memory, no matter how much it frightened me.

  My father taught me how to keep secrets. He was terrified that someone would find out about our genetic disorder, our curse as he called it. As a child, I learned to share his fear. I knew I was a thief, constantly stealing life from others in order to keep myself alive. If “they” find out, “they” will kill us, or so I believed without ever asking myself who these “they” were. I also knew that my brother was different, that somehow Roman had escaped the family curse.

  When I was eight, my father finally admitted the truth to my mother. She was furious, not about the disease as such, but about his deception. He’d never warned her about the genetic defect when they’d decided to have children. Reluctantly she too started lying, spreading the fiction about my “rare form of anemia.”

  Secrecy is a dangerous legacy. It’s also a hard habit to break.

  That evening, while Tor worked downstairs with his rune staves, I sat in the living room with a box of Contè sticks and a sketchbook. I loved sitting on the comfortable leather couch to draw. At times I’d look up to stare into the empty fireplace, which was faced with pale tan slabs of sandstone, cut into irregular shapes but fitted together like pieces of a puzzle. The faint, streaky grain of the stones intrigued me.

  First I drew a page of meaningless scribbles, gestural movements to loosen my arm. In the red scribbles I saw my father’s face. With the black stick I picked out the contours and let the rust color fill in the shadows and shading. I could see his image so clearly in my mind, his narrow face with the high cheekbones and slender nose, his droopy moustache over thin lips, and his dark eyes, oddly large for the shape of his face.

  My own eyes shared that feature. I’d been teased all my life, that my eyes were so large they made me look like a child, especially since I was shorter than average until I got a growth spurt when I was about fourteen. I used to console myself by thinking I looked like my dad and mother combined. I had her delicate Asian build and his eyes—and of course, his disease, his curse, the extra twist in his DNA, as I learned to think of it. A mutation that should have died out but somehow hadn’t. A mutation that could kill other people.

  What else had Dad told me? Something about the disease, some reason we had it besides the kinked genes—I stared at the drawing I’d done as if it could speak and tell me. Where had we been when he’d mentioned whatever it was? I had a dim memory of trees rustling in the wind and a long lawn stretching away in front of us. A city park, probably. Dimly I could hear his voice, or imagine I was hearing it. Our kind. Those words I remembered. Something about “our kind,” people who weren’t people like everyone else, people who came from somewhere different.

  He must have meant people whose DNA displays a “striking abnormality.” The memory and the news report fit together, all right, but what did they mean? I could go no further. Maybe Tor was right about those Neanderthals.

  I turned the page in the sketchbook and started a picture of my mother. I’d already written to tell her that I was going to get married and added a little sketch of Tor on the back of the letter. I wondered if she’d ever see it. Her family came from Indonesia, and she’d left us for Bali, where she entered a Buddhist nunnery, turned her back on the West and her children to seek the inner freedom she longed for. The abbess limited contact with the outside world, though I could hope that she’d let Mom hear from her only daughter, especially since the letter carried good news. The last time I’d seen her, I’d been nineteen, three whole years before.

  The page in the sketchbook blurred through my tears. I shut the book and slapped it down on the coffee table. I got up and went to get some tissues from the room I thought of as “my bedroom”.

  Usually Tor and I slept in the queen-sized bed in the master suite, but during the domination of the bear spirit, the suite became his cage. The bear wanted to run, to claw his way out of the flat and escape to the wild hills and the woods. He might have injured anyone that stood in his way, or he might have gotten lost, found himself miles from home without any clothes or ID once the full moon waned. To keep him safe I locked him in.

  So during those nights I slept in the other bedroom—the Burne-Jones bedroom, I liked to call it, with its coffered ceiling and thick red and yellow carpets. A deeply carved pattern of vines and wild roses covered the oak bedstead and matching dresser—very William Morris. A Tiffany lamp stood beside the bed. In the center of the bed’s headboard sat a carving of an anthropomorphic moon face. It showed a waxing quarter that day, but it would wax and wane as the Moon itself did. Tor’s sister Liv had added the moon face, a lunar calendar of sorts, to the bedstead. You could see it, but if you tried to touch it, your fingers registered only a wild rose and a segment of vine.

  I’d finished wiping my tears away when Tor came into the bedroom.

  “There you are,” he said. “I wanted to consult the barometer.”

  He meant the writing desk that stood to one side of the room. Under its many coats of black lacquer it resembled a piece made from one of Chippendale’s patterns. The top, which lifted up to reveal the desk’s innards, formed the background for decoupage. At least, it looked like decoupage, done with illustrations taken from old woodcuts in alchemical texts. Somehow Liv had enchanted it to display images that revealed the psychic state of the flat and its inhabitants at any given moment. We called it the alchemical barometer.

  The last time I’d looked at the desktop, it had shown me a skeleton holding a flask of black liquid. I’d avoided it ever since. That evening, however, the skeleton had changed into a woman with the crescent moon above her head. She held an enormous womb-shaped glass flask, which contained a white bird flying over a pool of blue liquid. All around this central image lay a circle of tiny red lions, standing nose to tail.

  Tor slipped an arm around my waist and joined me in contemplating the woman with the flask.

  “The red lions are back,” he said. “More power’s been released.”

  “What does the whole thing mean? Is the woman a good omen?”

  “Good omen? That’s too simple. It’s alchemical, and that means it’s complicated. You need to study the subject, sweetheart. That way you’ll be able to interpret these things for yourself.”

  “Okay. But right now I can’t pretend I know anything about it.”

  “Well, there’s never any use in pretending you’re something you’re not.” He gave me a smug grin. “Or pretending you’re not something you are.”

  “Oh, don’t start that again!”

  “You’re going to have to face up to it sooner or later. You’ve got a lot of magical talent.”

  I snarled at him. The sound shocked me, a snarl and a hiss like an angry cat. Tor blinked in open-mouthed surprise.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t know where that came from.”

  “From me badgering you, probably. Okay, I’ll lay off. But I’ve got to say one last thing. One of these days you’ve got to start thinking about your talents.”

  I knew he was right. I just wanted him to be wrong. The silence hung between us like a stain on the air.

  Tor finally broke it. “Do you have class tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I do. At ten in the morning.”

  The class I was taking wasn’t a class in the sense of going to a room and doing art or listening to a lecture on a given subj
ect. We were having a couple of weeks of orientation to “individual studies,” that is, to working alone on our senior project. Our various advisers took turns warning us to get organized and not goof off. Their main message: the year would pass a lot faster than we thought it would. Cynthia took notes on her laptop, but I brought a sketchbook and drew bits and pieces of imaginary landscapes under the pretence of taking notes. I did write down the various deadlines, “check-in times”, they were called.

  After class Cynthia and I stood out in the hall and chatted for a few minutes.

  “Where’s Brit?” I said.

  “At the hospital,” Cynthia said. “She texted me earlier and asked me to tell her what happened in class.”

  Brittany and my brother lived together. She’d been watching over him and keeping the hospital staff on their toes ever since he’d been shot.

  “Have you seen Roman this week?” Cynthia continued.

  “Not since Sunday. I’ll go this afternoon. Tor’s playing basketball with his guy friends.”

  “Okay, let me know how Roman’s doing.” She took out her phone and glanced at the time widget. “I’ve got to run. This color theory class is too good to miss.”

  “That’s good to know. I’ll fit it in next semester.”

  I went home and grabbed some lunch. Before I drove to San Francisco, I changed cars. Whenever I went to campus, I always took my car, the old green Chevy I’d owned when I moved in with Tor. He’d insisted on buying me a fancy German sedan that cost a small fortune. Gretel, as I called her, was a lot safer than my car, so I took her whenever I drove into San Francisco to visit Roman. When my brother had been shot, the ambulance crew had taken him to the nearest ER by the fastest route, an HMO hospital out on Geary Boulevard.

  As I hurried down the corridor to Roman’s room, I saw Brittany sitting in a chair just outside the closed door.

  “Are the doctors in with Roman?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Brit said. “They chased us out a couple of minutes ago.”

  Roman’s buddy Valdez, an ex-Army Ranger, was sitting on the floor near her. He was wearing jeans, a tee shirt, and an amazing jeans jacket. A picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, embroidered on linen and then appliqued, filled the back panel. The artist had stitched it in a multitude of colors, carefully shaded to give the figure depth and solidity. Surrounded by a wreath of satin stitch roses, wrapped in her blue, starry cloak she stood on the crescent moon.

  “Wow,” I said, “that jacket, it’s like an art piece.”

  “Look at the size of those stitches,” Brittany said. “They’re tiny. It’s beautifully done.”

  “Sure is,” Valdez said. “My sister did it when I was in Afghanistan. She told me that she kept praying I’d be okay. While she was sewing, y’know.”

  “And it worked.”

  He smiled at me. “Luck more than divine intervention.”

  “I was thinking magic more than angels.”

  Valdez blinked at me and suppressed another smile. He got up and peered down the corridor, back the way I’d come. “Where’s the Viking today?”

  I figured he meant Tor. “Hanging with his guy friends.”

  It was some time before the doctors came out of the room. A nurse followed with a plastic bag full of bloody bandages and latex gloves. The young doctor who knew I was Roman’s sister stopped to talk.

  “The healing’s just not progressing normally,” Dr. Mellars said. “He should have been ready to be discharged by now.”

  “It kind of seems like he’s been in here forever,” I said.

  “I’m sure it must. I’m worried about infection. I’m going to start him on a second course of antibiotics.”

  “Is it one of those resistant strains of bacteria? I read something about that on the Net.”

  “No, not as far as the lab can tell, and they do a pretty good job of telling.” The doctor gave me a reassuring smile. “Sepsis is always a problem in these deep penetration wounds. But we’ll get on top of it. I’m more worried about the—” he paused to glance up and down the hall, “about the hospital admin. They want to move him to the VA facility, and I don’t want him moved yet. I may have to bring in the big guns. The heavy artillery.” He grinned at me. “Your boyfriend.”

  “I’ll tell him to be ready. He likes yelling at authority figures.”

  “Good. Anyway, I have to go on to the next patient, but you can call my office if you’ve got questions. I gave you my card, right?”

  “Yes, last week.”

  “Okay. I answer calls around dinner time.”

  With that he strode off, clipboard in hand. The smell of antiseptics lingered in the air like spoiled perfume.

  “The thing about bullets,” Valdez said, “is they’re not packed under sanitary conditions. I don’t like the sound of this.”

  “Neither do I,” Brittany said. “And I’ve got to talk with the hospital dietician. I don’t like what they’re feeding him. He’s just not getting well.”

  When I went into the room, the others followed me. Roman had fallen asleep on his side, propped up against a long bolster to keep his weight off his wounded back. His black hair, as thick and straight as mine, was plastered to his olive-tan face with sweat. Brittany hurried over and stroked the wet hair back. He roused and smiled at her.

  “I’m exhausted,” he whispered. “Isn’t fun to have them poking around in there.”

  “Just go back to sleep, okay?” Brittany leaned over and kissed his forehead. “We all understand.”

  Roman smiled again and fell asleep so fast that my stomach clenched in fear. Sepsis—not the word you want to hear when someone you care about’s been wounded. Nils had used an old-fashioned revolver, the kind you load one bullet at a time. Had he put something on the bullets? Or cursed them, maybe?

  An IV pole stood beside the bed with a plastic bag hanging from it. Valdez read the label.

  “Morphine,” he said. “Shit! I wish they didn’t have to do that, but they do.”

  “He’s addicted again, isn’t he?” I said. “What’s going to happen when he’s well enough to go places on his own?”

  “I know.” Brittany’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Right back to his dealers and his druggie friends. It makes me sick, thinking about it.”

  “I’ll help, and our whole group will, too.” Valdez said. “That’s why group therapy works. We’re all tough mean bastards, and we look out for each other. I’ll give you my phone number. If anyone can keep Roman in line, it’ll be us.”

  Brittany managed a smile, not much of one, but a smile. “Thank you so much,” she said. “So okay, maybe it won’t happen.”

  But we knew damn well that it would happen. Roman had always been the prince of our family, the healthy kid, the successful athlete, the high school hero, until he joined the Marines in time for the Iraq War. When he came home, he brought a drug habit with him.

  I left shortly after, because I needed to get back over the Bay Bridge before rush hour. I had a shopping list with me, as well, of things Tor had asked me to pick up at the local supermarket. The bridge traffic was light, the supermarket not very crowded. Everything went so smoothly that I should have known something was about to go wrong.

  When I was small, my mother read me fairytales, some from Asia, some from Europe. The northern tales often featured giants. I used to shudder with enjoyable fear whenever a giant came into the story, but I never thought I’d meet a real one. How he’d gotten to Oakland I don’t know, but a Frost Giant had arrived in our driveway some weeks previously with a note from his father for Tor. I didn’t think he’d come back.

  Fail!

  In the TV shows and movies it looks so cute when a young teen meets an older woman and she becomes his first real crush, but it’s not so cute when the thirteen year old is about seven feet tall and still growing. When I arrived home from the store I found him standing in the driveway with a goopy smile on his dead-white face. His hair was white, too, and the irises so pale a gray
that from a short distance his eyeballs appeared solid white. He wore a pair of jeans, way too short in the leg, and a Minnesota Timberwolves tee shirt—an attempt on the part of the Frost Giants to make him pass for human.

  When I got out of the car, he hurried over and helped me lift the grocery bags out of the trunk.

  “Well, hello,” I said. “You came back?”

  “I wished to see you. You are well, yes?”

  “Very well. And you?”

  He shrugged and stared at me with unmistakable longing. “Your man,” he said after a minute, “he is a powerful vitki, yes?”

  “Very powerful. And very jealous.”

  “So my father warned me.” He sighed. “Vitkar, they are always jealous men.” He paused and looked into one of the shopping bags. “You have some vials of the elixir, I see.”

  It took me a moment to realize that he meant the family-sized bottles of cola. Since I was the one who’d introduced him to the stuff, I took out a bottle and gave it to him. In his hands it looked small enough to qualify as a vial.

  “Now drink it slowly this time,” I said. “No more of those thunder burps.”

  He blushed a faint pink. “I will, yes. I will give you a warning in return. There is a dead vitki in your house, too. Not your man, the live vitki. Another one. You know this, yes?”

  I turned cold all over. “I didn’t, no. Thank you for the warning.”

  “My grandmother told me so I know it is true. She told me, do not go into that house. The dead vitki will harm you.”

  “Your grandmother sounds like a wise woman.”

  “She is, yes.”

  He smiled and vanished. So did the bottle of cola.

  A dead vitki? Nils’ ghost, I figured, carrying on his damned feud.

  I locked the car into the garage and activated the security system, then carried the groceries upstairs. I had just finished putting them away when Tor returned from his basketball game. He came into the kitchen and rummaged in the refrigerator for a bottle of mineral water. His black Raiders tee shirt stuck to his back with sweat. For a minute he said nothing, just drank the water straight out of the bottle.