Sorcerer's Luck (7 page)

“You've got the artist's eye. Which reminds me. Do you need more drawing stuff? In case the
illusions come back. I bet whoever it is isn't going to give up after just one
try.”

“Probably not, no. I could use some more Conté and another sketchbook. I can get them at
the student store. They've got the best prices around.”

“Okay, buy what you need, and I'll reimburse you.”

On the way to class on Thursday, I stopped at the ATM for cash. My credit cards had hit
their limit, and I refused to add an overdraft fee to my horrendous bills. When
I bought the supplies after class, I made sure to get the receipt. I wanted to
keep my relationship to Tor as business-like as possible.

Which was going to be difficult, I realized, when I returned to the flat that afternoon.
I walked in to find Tor in the kitchen, putting away a sack of groceries. He
turned from a cabinet and gave me a smile that announced how pleased he was to
see me. His eyes became warm and alive. I felt myself respond, too, with my
familiar treacherous thought. What would it be like to kiss that smile, that
dimple at the corner of his mouth? I made myself look away and put the bag of
art supplies down on the counter.

“Let me give you the bill,” I said.

When I took receipt out of my purse, he walked over to take it from me. Our fingers
touched, then brushed against each other's hand. I drew back fast, and he
winced in disappointment.

“Tor,” I said, “I hardly know you, and you don't know much about me, either.”

For a moment I thought he was going to argue. He laid the money down on the counter,
scowled at it, then forced out a stiff smile.

“Well, that's true enough,” he said. “You're right, considering the way things are
now. Sorry.”

He turned sharply around and returned to putting away the groceries. I grabbed the bag of
sketchpads and fled the kitchen. As I was stashing the drawing supplies in
various rooms, I heard him go downstairs. When I went back into the kitchen, I
found the money he owed me lying on the counter.

The next time I saw him, about an hour later, he acted as if nothing had happened. So
did I—not that it worked for either of us. It's hot in the East Bay in July. I'd stood up for four hours, drawing preliminary graphite sketches of the
model. When I got a good one, I transferred it to canvas, then glazed with
acrylic medium. After class, I walked around the student store, where I'd
picked up a surge of élan along with the drawing supplies.

“I'm going to go clean up,” I said. “I know I stink.”

“I wouldn't call it that. You smell good to me.”

He meant it, too. His eyes had turned heavy-lidded, stripped of their usual bitterness,
and his mouth had relaxed into a soft curve instead of the tight line. I wanted
to walk over to him and let him kiss me. No, I wanted him to do a lot more than
just kiss me. I could feel the longing where it mattered.

 “Uh, I need to take a shower.” A cold one, I thought. Right now.

He sighed. “Yeah, I suppose you'd better.”

I hurried into my bedroom and shut the door behind me. I took a pair of shorts and a
shirt into the bathroom. Once I had the door closed and locked, I took off my
dirty clothes. After my shower, I put on the clean clothes behind the same
closed door. When I came out again, Tor had masked himself in the illusion of
the nerdy guy with the vacant eyes. He'd been reading on the couch, but he laid
his book aside and stood up.

“It'll be the full moon in about a week,” he said. “I thought you'd better see my lair.”
He tried to smile, then let it fade. “Well, it's the bjarki's lair when he's
dominant. It's mine the rest of the time.”

The lair turned out to be the master suite. The bedroom had soothing blue-gray walls, a
green and blue area rug, and antique furniture: a big oak bed, a dresser, an
oak wardrobe, and a couple of upholstered armchairs. There were yellow drapes
at a window that he'd fitted with safety glass, the kind with a fine mesh
embedded in it. On one wall hung the pastel portrait I'd done of him that day
at the fair. He'd had it matted and framed.

“I'm surprised you kept that,” I said.

“Well, it says a lot about me.” He gave me a shy smile. “Besides, you drew it.”

I had no idea what to say to that. I turned away and glanced around.

“What's the safety glass for?” I said.

“The bjarki tried to throw himself out of the window once. I pulled back just in time.”

“Do you still know you're Tor when you're transformed?”

“Kind of. It feels like I'm dreaming.” He frowned down at the floor. “That's the only
reason I haven't gone out and hurt someone. It's like there's two of me. And we
fight the whole damn time.”

“God, that must be awful!”

“It is, yeah.” He turned away and walked over to the clutter on top of his dresser. “Let
me give you the keys.”

On the outside of the door he'd installed a safety chain and a formidable looking
lock.

“There's a deadbolt, too.” He handed me a ring with two keys on it. “The bjarki gets
pretty desperate, and he bangs on the door a lot. I can't stop him till he
wears himself out.”

I glanced at the inside of the heavy wood door and noticed long claw marks. No way could
Tor have made those with his fingernails. I looked around and saw that
something had chewed the edge of the flimsier closet door into splinters. I
felt cold all over, and I must have turned pale, because Tor saw my reaction.

“It's really real.” His voice ached with sadness. “I know it's hard to believe, but I
really do turn into a bear. It's in the old sagas, too. I'll have to get you
some of those to read. You'll understand more, then.”

Just like my disease is real, I thought to myself. I wanted to tell him, to explain that
I lived under a curse just like he did, but I'd hidden my condition for so many
years, and I was so afraid of losing what he was giving me, that I kept silent.

Since I needed to buy gas, I left for school early the next morning. When I backed my
heap out of the garage, I noticed the filthy windshield and got out to attend
to it. I kept a roll of paper towels and a bottle of window cleaner in the back
seat. I was wiping down the glass when a gray car—a sleek, expensive-looking
ride—drove by the house. I would have thought nothing of it if the driver
hadn't looked familiar.

I only caught a glimpse of him, but he reminded me of Tor. Even though the sunny
morning was already heating up, he wore a jacket with the collar turned up, as
if he were hiding his face. I watched him as he drove down to the end of the
street and hung a right onto the avenue that led downhill toward Broadway. It
took me a few minutes to clean all the car windows, but when I drove down and
turned onto the avenue, I spotted him, parked in a driveway half-hidden by
trees.

When I drove by, he pulled out and followed me. I kept glancing into the rear view
mirror and caught glimpses of him, enough to confirm that he was the man I'd
seen looking into the café window, the older guy who resembled Tor. At the gas
station, he drove on by and merged into the lane that would eventually take him
onto the freeway. Even so, I kept glancing into the rear-view mirror all the
way to school. I never spotted him.

Was he the same guy who'd sent those illusions? I had no way of knowing, but who else
would it have been? Maybe he was checking me out, seeing if the woman who'd
thwarted him was a permanent resident at Tor's. I could come up with any number
of paranoid ideas

After class, Cynthia, Brittany, and I were walking to the parking lot together.
Brittany was telling me about Roman's progress with the group therapy when I had the
feeling that I was being watched. It grew so strong that I stopped and turned
slowly around, looking at every building, every tree, anything that might
shelter a staring creep.

“What is it?” Cynthia said.

“I keep feeling like someone's watching me, but there's no one there.”

“That must be what's causing the weird vibe,” Brittany said. “I've been picking up
something all morning, and I bet that's it.”

“What kind of something?” Cynthia said.

“I dunno exactly.” Brittany considered for a moment. “Like something was disturbing my
aura. A feeling of danger but not to me. I thought it meant Roman was in
trouble, but maybe it applies to Maya instead.”

“You know,” I said. “I don't think I'll go to lunch with you guys, after all. I want to go
home.”

“Just be careful when you're driving,” Brittany said. “Don't go on the freeway, okay?”

“Okay. I'll see you Monday.”

I took Brittany's advice. Over the past few years I'd often joined Cynthia in teasing
Brittany about her goopy New Age ideas, but now I regretted not paying them more attention.
Maybe we'd always suspected she was right, I thought. Maybe that's why we had
to tease her, so we could pretend the universe was all clean and rational, that
shape-changers and sorcerers only existed in the fantasy books. Even though I
called myself a vampire, I'd never put myself in the same class as those
fictional creatures of the night. I was just a girl with an awful disease.

Wasn't I?

When I got back to the house, I found Tor in the kitchen, where he was cutting up
vegetables for salad. He looked so normal, so solid, that I wanted to run to
him and ask him to hold me. Instead I just said hello.

“What's wrong?” he said. “You look like something frightened you.”

“Something did.”

When I told him about the car following me and my feelings of being spied upon, Tor frowned
in thought for a couple of minutes.

“Have you ever come back here when I was gone?” he said eventually. “I'm wondering if
he's trying to see you re-arming the security system.”

“So he can get the passcode?” I thought back over my brief time of living in the flat. “No,
you've always been here, and so the system's been off.”

“That's a relief. Though I don't know why he'd spy on you when you're in school, if the
passcode's what he wants.” He considered this for another minute, then
shrugged. “I wonder if he drove by to make sure you were living here now.”

“That'd be my guess, yeah.”

“It's a good thing you're not living alone anymore, with this guy hanging around spying
on you.”

I went cold all over. “It's something you're always aware of,” I said, “when you're a girl
on your own, being stalked, I mean. But I don't think this guy's just the usual
kind of creep.”

“He can't be, yeah. Pervs don't usually know how to scry. I'll bet he's our illusionist,
or at least, he's got to be connected to the attacks. Sorcerers don't grow on
trees, y'know.”

I managed to smile at the joke.

“Look,” Tor continued, “let's not take any chances. Are you going out tonight or anything?”

“No. I was going to start reading the books you loaned me.”

“Okay. That'll give me time to do a thorough job. I'm going to make you a bindrune
talisman. It'll look like a piece of jewelry, a pendant on a thong. You'll need
to wear it whenever you leave the house.”

“Bindrune?”

“That's just the name for this kind of operation. You bind the magic into the object
with the runes. It looks like a monogram. I'll use a couple of runes that offer
protection and combine them into a little design, then energize them. If
someone's using magic to spy on you, it'll keep the prying eyes off.” He gave
me a sly smile. “If it doesn't work, then maybe we should see about getting you
into therapy.”

I laughed and pretended to swat at him with one hand. He grinned in return, his real
smile, not the nerdy illusion. I felt like my heart had turned over in my
chest. He was watching me expectantly, as if he were hoping I'd give him an
opening, or make the first move, or in some other way give into the raw desire
I felt swirling around us. If it had been just smidgen stronger, I swear, it
would have been as visible as smoke.

“I'd better clean up before lunch,” I said instead.

His grin disappeared, but he forced out a civil expression.

“Okay,” he said. “While you do that, I'm going to send my sister another email. I can't
help wondering if the guy you saw drive by is a relative. I don't come from a
big family, so if he looked like me, well, that's evidence. And if he is from
my family, who knows what kind of magic he can work? Something strange,
probably.”

Tor spent the afternoon down in the lower flat, while I stayed in my room reading. The
Norse myths were good stories, just as he'd told me, though kind of on the grim
side. When we ate dinner, I asked him if he and his family believed in gods
like Odin and Thor.

“Not literally,” he said, “not like Fundi Christians believe in their Jesus. The
Norse gods represent principles of the universe, true things in their way. You
can contact those principles, or the forces that emanate from them, and then
they feel like persons. Sometimes I do feel like I'm talking to Odin, and He
hears me.” His face turned slightly pink. “But that's just the human mind,
turning abstract principles into something concrete.” The pink got brighter. “Not
that I'm divinely inspired or anything. I don't mean to preach.”

“You're not preaching,” I said. “This is all really cool stuff.”

But when I asked a couple more questions, he gave me short, embarrassed answers, and so I
let the subject drop.

After dinner Tor went downstairs to charge my talisman, or so he told me. Whatever
that entailed took several hours. I was sitting in one of the leather
armchairs, studying the view of the Bay and San Francisco, when he returned. I
stood up to see what he'd brought me: a beautiful pendant, a thin oak roundel
about an inch and a half in diameter, dangling from a leather thong. He'd
incised the design, then laid rust-colored paint, or so I thought, in the
grooves. He'd glazed the whole thing with acrylic medium—I recognized the faint
scent—to seal it. The runes reminded me of old-fashioned peace symbols, but
placed upside-down, each set at a different angle to form a kind of bouquet.
Lying horizontally across their nexus were two axe-like shapes, each a line
with a little triangle placed in the middle. One triangle faced down, and the
other, up.