Sorcerer's Luck (20 page)

“A grim old guy,” I said. “The painter, though—whoever did this was technically really
competent. I wonder why they didn't sign it.”

“Liv wondered about that, too. Probably Grandfather didn't want anyone else's name
on it. That'd be like him.”

The more I studied the painting, the more uncomfortable I felt. The eyes of any portrait
will follow you if the sitter's looking straight out of the canvas. I knew
that. Still I felt that he, or someone, or something, was watching me through
this particular pair of painted eyes. I remembered Brittany saying that
portraits might have frightened Nils somehow.

“Tor, do you think Nils got one of these, too?”

“Probably. Halvar admitted Nils was his kid, after all. Huh, if all Nils got from the will
was this lousy portrait, no wonder he's pissed off.” Tor grinned at me. “Like
that t-shirt joke.”

“That's not funny.”

“Why?”

 “I don't know, but the portrait creeps me out, and if he's got one, I bet it creeps him
out, too.” I turned away with a little shudder. “I've seen enough. More than
enough.”

“Okay. I'll put him back in his coffin.” Tor picked up the cloth wrap. “That's how I always
think of this drawer.”

Watching him wrap the portrait up jogged my memory about another grim family story.

“When we were at Bryndis's, y'know?” I said. “She mentioned the name of Gerda's mother.
Rosalie, wasn't it?”

“No.” He hesitated. “Rosilde.”

“Something's bugging you about that, isn't it?”

He shrugged. He put the painting away and shut the drawer, then turned off the
overhead light. I followed him when he left the closet-room and went into the
library. He strode over to the window, where he stood looking out with his back
to me.

“Tor?” I said. “What's wrong?”

“We didn't have a source of supplies in the resistance, only what we could steal.” He
turned around, and I'd never seen his eyes so bleak, so full of remembered
pain. “So we stole it from the Nazis. I've told you about the supply trains.
And killing their patrols. When we wiped out a patrol, we'd ski down and strip
them of everything we could—ammunition, guns, food, anything they carried that
we could use. And one time I was stripping a man I'd shot, but he was still
alive. I don't think he realized I was Norwegian. I was wearing a Nazi winter
jacket I'd taken from another soldier. He looked at me and said in German, tell
Rosilde and our little girl I loved them.” Tor shoved his hands into his jeans
pockets and tipped his head a little back. “So I said I would, and he died.”

“Oh god! You don't think—”

“It's not that common a name, Rosilde. Wyrd, Maya. I knew I felt wyrd all around us.”

I wanted to tell him that he couldn't possibly remember, that he had to be wrong. That Nazi
officer—he couldn't have been Nils' grandfather. Too much of a coincidence—but
if everything I'd read about wyrd was correct, then coincidence had nothing to
do with it. Over Tor's shoulder I could see, just outside the window, three
women standing in the yard. I stared, took one step toward them, and saw them
disappear into shadows. I squelched a scream.

“What is it?” Tor said. “What did you see?”

“The Norns. Just for a second.”

He nodded,his mouth set and grim. “Wyrd,” he said eventually. “I knew that when I found
you again, the threads, the knots—they'd start to unravel.”

I could think of nothing to say to that. Tor shrugged, and the mood around us broke.

“Y'know,” he said, and his voice stayed perfectly calm, “I think I'll cast the rune
staves. I want to make sure that Nils isn't going to give Bryndis any trouble.
And I want to email Liv, too, and tell her what Bryndis said.”

I went back upstairs. I thought about drawing, but I was afraid of the images that might
appear. I avoided looking at the writing desk, too. I did keep thinking about
wyrd, and the knots and tangles. I felt convinced without knowing why that a
lot of those tangled threads led back to Grandfather Halvar

Another remembrance of that sour old man sat on Tor's chest of drawers, a leather case
embossed with Halvar's initials, obviously an antique. I'd noticed it before,
but I'd never seen Tor open it. That afternoon I released the little gold latch
and flipped back the lid. On a lining of blue velvet, crushed down and worn in
places, lay a pair of military hair brushes, a straight-edge razor, and other
toilet articles. The brushes had tortoise-shell backs, but the razor and the
rat-tail comb were steel. They must have been manufactured in the 1930s, I
figured from the severe Deco shapes. Worn straps kept the brushes in place, but
the comb had come free of its restraint. I picked it up and noticed a couple of
tiny splinters of wood lying on the velvet beside the razor.

I took the comb and picked out the splinters, then closed the case. Looking at the skinny
fragments of wood lying in the palm of my hand gave me an oddly uneasy feeling.
When I examined the gouges on the bedroom door, the splinters matched. I went
over to the closet door and knelt down. The rat-tail end of the comb fit into
the supposed toothmarks in the wood. I remembered the non-existent animal hair on
the blankets, too. For a moment I wondered if Tor had been faking the
shape-change, but I'd seen the pain in his eyes and heard it in his voice
whenever he mentioned the bjarki. I'd lived through the bear-nights and
listened to him moan and growl.

Besides, why would anyone fake something like that?

I heard Tor come upstairs. I called out, “I'm in the bedroom.” He walked in and waved a
piece of paper in my direction. I was still kneeling by the chewed-up door.

“The staves looked pretty positive,” Tor said, “but not one hundred per cent positive. I
want to get a better fix on Nils. I—what are you doing?”

“Trying to
figure something out. Tor, look, these marks on the door. Do you remember
chewing on it when you were in bjarki form?”

“Not what you'd call remembering.” He thought for a moment. “More like dream images, just
bits and pieces. Floating around my mind. When I came back, after the bjarki
left me, I mean, I saw the damage and sort of remembered chewing.” He thought
again. “My jaws hurt.”

“But you don't have a real clear memory of opening your bear's mouth and putting it on
the door.”

“No, I sure don't.” He stared at the floor and thought for several minutes. Finally he
looked up with a shrug. “That's strange, now that you mention it.”

“Come look at this.”

Tor folded up the paper and put it into his shirt pocket. When he knelt down beside me, he
displayed not one little trace of the anxiety or fear of being caught out in a
lie. A person who'd made up an elaborate fiction about themselves would have
had some kind of reaction. I handed him the comb. He stared at the sharp end of
the handle, then at the door.

“Shit!” he said. “Maya, this is really creepy.” He twisted around to look back at the door
into the room. “Does this match those marks, too?”

“No, but I found these when I looked in your grandfather's leather case, the one on the
dresser. They were lying by the razor.”

 When he handed me the comb back, I dropped the splinters into his open palm. He studied
them for a long moment.

“But I remember clawing at the door,” he said eventually. “Not real clearly. Not like
remembering playing basketball or something like that, but I remember it.” He
hesitated and held up his other hand. “I remember seeing the gouges appear in
the door. I don't remember seeing a paw.”

“You told me once you saw a bear in the mirror when you looked.”

“Yeah. Now that I do remember.” He stood up and glanced in the direction of the bathroom. “In
the mirror over the sink.”

“How tall is the bjarki? I mean, like, would his head be high enough to see over the sink
if he was on all fours?”

Tor shook his head no. He walked over the wastebasket, and dropped the splinters
into it before he said anything. “I don't remember standing up on hind legs,
but bears can, y'know, and they can walk or dance like humans. I remember
walking in and seeing a bear in the mirror.”

I got to my feet. “When you were bitten,” I said, “you had rabies shots, right?”

“Yeah. It's a sequence of shots. First you get immunoglobulin, right near the bite, and
that hurts like hell.” He rubbed his thigh, remembering. “Then there's a series
of vaccines.”

“They started the shots right away?”

“Oh yeah. I went straight to the ER, down at Marin General. The bite was still oozing. They
figured the dog—we all thought it was a dog—had to be rabid. Why else would it
have run right up to me and attacked? A healthy lost dog would have tried to
get me to take care of it. Y'know, fawned around my feet. That kind of thing.”

“Some people say lycanthropy's a virus, don't they?”

“Yeah. Not that any doctor's ever done any kind of study.”

“Of course not, but the shots, they're vaccines against a virus, aren't they? What if
lycanthropy's related to rabies? Doesn't rabies give people hallucinations?”

“Do you think I did get rabies?”

“No. I'm wondering if those shots weakened the disease. Like, they couldn't prevent it
because it's not exactly the same virus, but maybe you didn't get the full
effects. That might explain why you feel like an animal, but you don't turn
into an actual bear.”

Tor stared at me so long and so silently that I began to wonder if I'd said something
really stupid. He caught his breath and nodded.

“I bet you're right.” He sounded weary. “Huh, I hired you to see through illusions.
You're doing a good job.”

I forced out a smile.

“I feel like the bear,” Tor continued. “I act like one, but I'm still an ape in here.
Grab a tool and bang on the door when I want to get out. Think I'm biting it.
The sore jaw—just from grinding my teeth in anger, I bet. Y'know, rage.
Frustration.”

He turned and strode out of the bedroom. I put the comb back into the leather case, then
followed. He sat down on the edge of the couch and leaned forward to stare into
the empty fireplace. He let his hands dangle between his knees, a gesture that
made them look like paws. I sat down next to him.

“If I really turned into an actual bear,” Tor said, “I could rip that door right off
its hinges, locks or no locks. They're powerful animals, especially one my
height.”

“A grizzly?” I said.

“Or an Arctic brown. They're big motherfuckers. Y'know, the old legends are full of bears
that act like men. Even bears that get women pregnant. That's where the bjarki,
the bear's son, legend comes from. Like Beowulf and Bodvar Bjarki.”

“Huh! The girls just made that up when their fathers wanted to know who got them
pregnant.”

Tor managed to smile at that—a weak, brief smile, but a smile. “What I see in the mirror,”
he continued, “is what I expect to see. I feel like an animal. I was raised on
those old stories. What else would I see but a bear? But the hair on the
blankets must be real. No, I could be just projecting that, too. You didn't see
it.”

“And when we went to look for it, you couldn't see it either.”

“That was probably because you'd tipped me off that it might not really be there.” He
thought for a couple of minutes before he spoke again. “When you study sorcery,
you learn to see things outside of you that are really inside of you. Inside
your mind, I mean. Unconscious content. Once you learn how to project it out,
then sometimes you do it without thinking.”

“There are some people,” I said, “who can hold an image in their mind and then push it out
onto the paper where they can see it just like it was really there. An
instructor told my class once that people who can cut elaborate silhouettes can
do that.”

“That's exactly what I mean, yeah. The bite, the virus, whatever it was,” Tor went on, “it
set me up to act like a bjarki. And feel like one, too. But I must not
transform. Not all the way, anyway. I wish there was some way you could see me
and tell me, but it wouldn't be safe. I'm enough animal to maybe harm you. We
could cut a hole in the door, or no. Maybe I'd do something creepy through it,
stick a claw through, something.” He shuddered. “Besides, I still couldn't see
myself.”

“What about a camcorder? We could set one up in a corner of the bedroom.”

“Up high, where the bjarki couldn't reach it, yeah. You could turn it on and then lock me
in.” He shuddered again, violently this time. “Ugly thought. It's probably kind
of disgusting. But I've got to know.”

I felt totally creeped out, myself. The man I'd been sleeping with, the man I'd come
to love—in the locked room he turned into something, someone, different and
dangerous. The possibility of seeing what happened terrified me, but like him,
I had to know.

“I guess,” I said, “we could just set the thing up and let it run. I don't know anything
about those. We never had one when I was a kid. Maybe we could ask your friend
Billy.”

Tor rolled his eyes. “You know what he'd think, don't you?”

“No. What?”

“That we wanted to record ourselves having sex.”

Totally squicky! I squealed, not at the idea of recording us, but at the idea of Billy
thinking we were going to and maybe imagining things. “Scratch that idea,” I
said. “Wait a minute! What about those nanny cams? Y'know, you can set one up
in your baby's room to watch while it sleeps.”