Sorcerer's Luck (25 page)

Silence, a long dead-air period of silence.

“Maya,” Cynthia said eventually. “You sound so tired and shaky that I'm half inclined
to believe you.”

“It's true. I am not joking. At the full moon he—well, he doesn't actually turn into a
bear.” I got a sudden insight. “He gets possessed by the spirit of a bear.
That's the only way I can describe it. It's like some entity from the spirit
world grabs hold of him. He acts like a bear. He's not a bear. But oh god, he's
suffering.”

“Maya!” Her voice rose in a small shriek.

“I'm not lying.” I snuffled back a mouthful of tears. “Look, call Brittany, will you?
Tell her what I told you. She'll explain.”

Again the silence, trembling with shock. I wondered if I were about to lose one of my
closest friends. Cynthia drew in a deep, audible breath.

“Okay,” she said. “I will do that. I did talk with her earlier today. I wanted to see how
your brother was doing. Better, by the way. But anyway, she went on and on
about Tor being some kind of magician. A runemaster, she called him. Are you
going to tell me she was right?”

“Yeah. That's exactly what I'm telling you. But it's real dangerous work.”

“Guess it must be. Is that what got him this spirit or whatever it is?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Okay.” She sighed. “Look, I'll let you go. I'll call back after I've talked to Brittany.”

While I waited for her return call, I ate something. I don't remember what. When I
finished, I turned on all the lamps in the living room, kitchen, my bedroom,
and the bathroom across from it. I wanted to fill the flat with light. I
gathered my drawing materials and laid them out on the coffee table near the
laptop. I'd just sat down on the couch when Cynthia called. Once again, I took
the phone down the hall.

“When I told Brit what you told me,” Cynthia said, “she said ‘I thought so!' She was
just surprised he wasn't a werewolf. Or a tiger, she said. I guess those are
supposed to be more common than bears.”

“In Indonesia they are, tiger spirits, I mean. My mom talked about them sometimes. But Tor's
from the Northlands.”

“Okay. If any of this makes sense, that makes sense.”

“Do you believe us?”

“I believe you because you guys are you and you are my friends. That'll have to do for
now.”

“It's enough. Thank you.” I choked back tears. “I mean that. Thank you.”

“So okay, as Brit would say. Is there anything I can do to help? I'll do it.”

I considered. I had plenty of ordinary food. Tor was safely locked in. I was
willing to bet that Nils presented no threat, either. The one thing I longed
for—another source of élan—was the one thing I would never take from my
friends.

“I don't think there's anything you can do,” I said. “But thank you.”

“I'll call now and then. Just to check in. So will Brit.” Cynthia hesitated briefly. “Hang
in there. I don't know what else to say.”

“Just knowing you guys know—god, it really helps.”

“Good. I'm going to go online and see what I can find out about these animal spirits.
Knowledge is power and all that crap.”

I managed to laugh, and we ended the call.

Knowing they knew, knowing they were still my friends—it gave me enough strength to
pick up a sketchbook and draw. The earplugs helped, too. Through them I could
still hear him when he roared, but they did cut out the painful little whimpers
and moans. I knew he hurt. I could do nothing about it because I didn't dare
open the locked door.

Still, at times my eyes filled with tears. I let them fall on the first drawing I made. I
drew Tor as I knew him, fully human, dressed in jeans and his Raiders T-shirt.
I knew his body so well that I got a good likeness just from memory. The tears
splashed onto his chest, where I would have wept had I had been able to hold
him.

I turned the page and wondered what to draw next. A wolf, maybe, but not real wolves,
not the intelligent pack animals who loved their young and lived in a hierarchical
society. No, I wanted to draw the mythical kind, the lone wolves. I was
thinking of Fenrir and the wolf in “Peter and the Wolf,” dangerous killers,
lean, red-eyed, gaunt bodies, fangs.

Nils. I felt him as I drew as tangibly as if he prowled around the living room.
Although his mind registered on mine as under the animal's spell, I felt none
of the physical pain Tor was feeling. Nils was confused, easily distracted, but
he seemed at home in the wolf body, though he paced back and forth, wherever he
was, angry, filled with hate. I kept drawing, gestural studies at first, then
stronger lines, more fully realized images. Under the hatred I sensed a
different emotion, complex, hard to pin down at first. I turned the page and
started yet another drawing.

Disgust. Loathing at what he became under the evil stare of the full moon. Self-hatred
mingled with the hatred he felt for Tor, who—the wolf lacked words. He could
not tell me or himself why he hated Tor. I could find no image for it. In wolf
form Nils's mind only knew emotions and concrete images. I picked up his desire
to feed on dead things and to kill Tor. He had reasons to hate Tor, but the
wolf could only remember being driven from the pack where Tor's father was
alpha male.

 He couldn't give form to what poisoned his soul, but he wanted something. This
thing, an object, was prey, it was safety, it was sex—everything in life that
the wolf knew as good and desirable. Tor had it. Tor refused to share it. The
only possible object was the gold ornament with the runes, the one that Tor
kept away from him in the safe downstairs. A lust for gold would have been too
abstract for the wolf to understand, too remote from the animal's world. The
Fehu rune had pointed to the ornament. I wrote my thoughts on the same page as
the drawing, notes for Tor when he came back to me.

I looked away from the page and for the briefest of moments I saw him, the wolf with
human blue eyes, staring at me. I screamed. The sight vanished, but the touch
of his mind remained.

I could no longer endure contact with Nils. He sickened me. I shut the sketchbook and
flopped it down on the coffee table. The slapping sound it made against the
wood broke the spell. I got up and went to the west window. By craning my neck
and leaning to one side, I saw the full moon at its zenith. Only half of Night
One had passed. I walked over to a floor lamp and held my hands under the
light. They looked perfectly normal. So far, at least, my body held enough élan.

I decided to stop being a coward. I sat back down and opened the laptop, turned on the
monitor, and realized that with the moon so high above the window level, the
bedroom had gone dark. The camera showed mostly lumps of darker shadows. I
stopped recording and peered at the murky image on the screen. I could just see
Tor, curled up by the bathroom door, asleep. “Thank god,” I whispered and shut
down the system.

As the days and nights of the full moon crawled by, I worked out a routine of
sorts around the sessions of recording from the camera in the bedroom. Watching
Tor, hearing him growl and moan, hurt like knives to the heart, but I managed to
keep on top of the situation. Well, mostly I did. There were times when I broke
down to see him in so much pain. But overall, because I knew what was going to happen,
I could at least keep the panic element at bay. Tor would come back. He would
feed me all the élan he'd stored against the bjarki transformation. I wasn't
going to die. I had friends. Either Cynthia or Brittany called every four or
five hours. Talking with Brit about my brother made me remember that other
people had problems of their own.

In the intervals I drew. I had a lot of sketchpads left from when I'd first taken
Tor's job. Before the full moon came, I'd also bought some new oil pastels as
well as Conté. I tried to draw normal subjects: the view from the windows, the
Chinese vases in the living room. At night, though, in the times when the full
moon gleamed in the window like the watchfire of an enemy army, the drawings
drew themselves—pictures of Tor under the bjarki spell, of the Norse gods, of
Nils, and of my father.

I thought of Dad often when my élan began to run dangerously low. On the third morning,
my knuckles swelled and turned red. My legs ached, knees first, then as the day
ground on, my hips. I sweated, a constant clammy drip. I'd shower, stay
comfortable for maybe an hour, and then the sweat would start oozing out of my
skin again. I gulped mineral water by the tumbler full. When I thought back, I
couldn't remember my father having symptoms like mine. His hurt lay inside him,
in his heart and other vital organs.

That day I slept as much as I could, guarding every precious drop of élan. I told Brittany
and Cynthia that I'd become too exhausted to talk on the phone, which was true
enough. Yet that night, as it always eventually did, the full moon began to
wane. I woke up in the morning to the sound of hissing water that meant Tor was
taking a shower. I got out of bed, grabbed the keys, and ran naked to the door
of our bedroom just as the water pulse stopped. I could hear Tor calling to me
in a human voice. I opened the door and saw him grinning at me, fully human
again, and as naked I was.

“I bet I know what you want,” he said. “Come here and let me feed you.”

“And I bet I know what
you
want.” I grinned in return. “I can feed while we make
love. Well, assuming you're finished with all that élan you stockpiled.”

He laughed and enfolded me in his embrace. We fell on the bed together.

We stayed in bed for most of the day. It wasn't only the élan nor just the good sex that
kept me there. Lying close to him, hearing his voice, seeing him smile at me,
and best of all, knowing he no longer ached in every muscle and sinew—together
they added up to a different kind of joy. I ran my hands through his hair,
stroked his chest, kissed the bruises on his shoulders that the bjarki's
struggles had put there—”to make them better,” I said. He laughed and kissed me
in turn, told me he loved me over and over.

“I can't believe you're still here,” he said. “I was pretty sure you'd cut and run once
you saw what happened.”

“No. It hurt to watch, but I wasn't revolted or anything. You don't turn into a bear. I
don't care what you see in the mirror. You stay a man, but oh my god, Tor! Do
you remember the pain?”

“Oh yeah.” His voice turned bleak. “It gets pretty bad at first.” He lay on his back and
frowned at the ceiling. “I wonder if it's because I don't change all the way.
My body keeps trying, and shit, it really burns in here.”

“It does ease up after a while?”

“By the third day, yeah.”

Not fast enough to spare him much. I sat up and thought about Nils, the contact I'd made
while drawing the wolf. “I bet that Nils doesn't feel pain once he's in varg
form.”

Tor's eyes narrowed with questions.

“Let's get up and get dressed,” I said. “I want to eat, and you probably do, too. I've got
an awful lot to tell you.”

I had a lot to show him, as well. After we'd eaten, we sat on the couch together and paged
through the drawings I'd made while the bjarki had held him in its claws. The
information I'd gleaned about Nils turned Tor grim. He sat rock-still for a
long time, staring at the finished drawing, until eventually he read my notes
aloud in a voice that ached with fury.

“Any more?” he said. “Pics, I mean.”

“Not of the varg. I did do some drawings of my father in another notebook.”

He closed the sketchbook he was holding with a snap. “I'd like to see those one day,” Tor
said. “Not now. I'm in such a shit mood it would spoil the experience.” He laid
the sketchbook on the coffee table. “I want to see the recordings. Get it all
over with. Let me get a beer first. My back still hurts, and that'll help. Do
you want something to drink?”

“A little brandy. Please.”

Tor fetched himself a bottle of dark beer and a snifter with a moderate amount of brandy
for me. Watching the recordings with him safe beside me was an entirely
different experience than making them had been. I could lean back and watch him
watch instead of agonizing over the video. Now and then he winced at some of
the images, but he seemed strangely detached from the footage, even analytical.
About half-way through he leaned forward and stopped the playback.

“That's enough for now,” he said. “You were right. What I see during the domination is
all illusion. When I'm in there, I look at my arms and see legs. I see paws. I
look in the mirror and see a bear's face looking back. I'm covered with a pelt.”

“None of that shows up here.”

“Damn right.” He stood up. “I'm going to get another beer. Want more brandy?”

“No, I've had plenty.”

Tor frowned at the empty bottle in his hand. “I'll wait, too,” he said. “I want to go down
and cast the rune staves.”

While he did, I took a shower. I really needed one by then. I dried my hair, put on
clean clothes, and came back to the living room to find him looking back and
forth from the laptop screen to a piece of sketchbook paper. He was writing
with one of my felt-tips. A full bottle of beer stood on the table. He laid the
pen down and held out the paper.

“Email from my sister,” Tor said. “I told her earlier about your theory. Nils being the
varg, I mean. I went onto email just now to tell her you were right, but she'd
already answered. So I translated it for you.”

I took the letter and sat down next to him.

“Something I have been thinking about,” Liv wrote. “Do you remember the pattern of our
father's illness? After the marrow transplant he seemed much better, but in a
few months the disease returned. The doctors were surprised by this. One told
me that it should not have happened, or at least, not so fast. And then the
pattern started. At the dark of the moon, he would sink and the blood count
would be very bad. He would start to improve and the blood count at the full
moon would be much much better. I thought then that it was only the influence
of the lunar energies. But what if it had something to do with Nils? At the
full moon, he would not be able to attack. At the dark he would be at his
strongest.”