by Amy B. Nixon
“It was a summoning accident,” she corrected me. “We were able to find only one of the spirits involved in it, and we drew a statement from him, claiming your parents had been present, along with your aunt.”
I tried to swallow the lump nestled in my throat. “What sort of a summoning accident?”
She paused in front of the double doors leading to the Dining Hall. There was too much sadness in her eyes. It made me wonder if she knew my entire family.
“An awful creature,” she uttered after a few moments of silence. “One we should never speak of.”
And with that, she opened one of the doors, and left me standing in the corridor, filled with more unanswered questions than ever before.
The itch to research my family’s history overtook my system, but part of me was scared I’d only stumble on some nasty, dark secret. It was the same part that kept whispering how I had grown into a bitter, aimless, good for nothing being, undeserving of… well, anything really. I wasn’t good enough for my exes or for my friends, otherwise they wouldn’t have started avoiding me. They saw me as pathetic because people got their hearts broken all the time, but I couldn’t get over my own heartbreak.
Stupidly, somehow I had thought a change of scenery would help.
The new people around me also saw me as pathetic, because I wasn’t able to ease into magic, despite my last name. The ones who saw me differently thought I was someone they needed to be afraid of. Monika and her brother seemed to be the genuinely friendly exceptions. Naturally, I couldn’t help myself but believe how once they spent enough time around me, they’d start seeing what my old friends had seen – a rotten core that had to be avoided at all cost.
During lunchtime, I weighed my options – go see dead people in an evocation exercise, or go read about dead people in the library. My choice was a no-brainer.
As I made my way to the library wing, my thoughts drifted to my late parents.
I remembered them as calm, grounded, supportive people. They were both engineers and were happy with my interests in computers. The worst thing they ever did was put Journey’s Separate Ways on the CD player too often, but being addicted to a stupid rock hit from the eighties wasn’t a crime. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t picture them getting involved in summonings, let alone spending their free time gathering with necromancers to practice black magic.
Then again, I had killed two men during my first week here with my inherited black magic. As much as I didn’t want to think about my parents as dark casters, they had spawned a murderer.
I spoke my last name in the library’s Section RA1. So many volumes popped up, soaring freely in the air around me, that I immediately gave their spines a gentle push and decided to switch to a different technique.
“Learyn Dustrikke.” Apparently, my name wasn’t mentioned in any records. “Okay, let’s try something else. Eivind Dustrikke?”
Dozens of books flew out from different bookcases.
I quickly gathered them on the way to Section RC1’s reading rooms. Every volume seemed too old to be dated from this century, but my parents had their summoning incident eight years ago. I skimmed through all books, only to find Eivind was a common Old Norse name, and my dad wasn’t the only Eivind Dustrikke.
Knowing my family had fed me lies my entire life, I hadn’t bothered researching the Dustrikke line up until today. By the looks of it, I had a lot of research to do.
When dusk settled in, my frustration had taken the best of me.
The only book I hadn’t touched had a leather hardcover, and I was dead sure it wasn’t faux leather. Some poor animal had been skinned for its binding. Maksim’s joke about a book made of human flesh spun through my memories. Good thing I hadn’t picked this one from the Warded Sections! Carefully opening it at last, I hoped the unfortunate creature had died quickly.
There wasn’t a table of contents, but the pages held something more useful than what I found in the pile of other volumes – family trees.
Frantically turning over page after page, I found my entire line. It took up five whopping pages! The branches on the fifth page’s bottom, indicating the newest family members, were two – one for Eivind Dustrikke and one for Adaline Dustrikke. My aunt and uncle never got married, so it made sense for the book to lack further info on her branch, while Eivind’s branch was intertwined with Syverine Olsen.
The list stopped there. No Leah, no Learyn, no children, nada.
I closed the book and turned my attention back to the others. Maybe there was a spell or something to help me narrow down the search for the night my parents had died. If there was, Monika probably knew it. When she didn’t respond to my text message, I gathered all volumes in my hands, and headed for our room.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait for my roommate.
Monika was sitting on her bed cross-legged, with her back against the wall. Painful grimaces danced on her face while her body winced and twitched with convulsions. Her eyes were fixed somewhere on the ceiling, her mouth curved in a frown. One hand rested on her knee, palm up, slashed right in the middle in a diagonal line. An open wound, painted in crimson.
Dropping all books on the floor, I shot myself forward.
“Monika!” I yelled, clutching her shoulders. “Monika!”
She was irresponsive.
I fiddled with a nearby box of tissues under the sound of my pulse’s violent bashing, until I finally managed to get some paper out and press it over the wound. My hands were shaking, similarly to her writhing body, and I shouted her name once more, but she kept staring at the ceiling with that same painful look.
With ragged breaths, I removed the tissue from Monika’s hand, eyeing her wound.
“Helbrede!” I ordered with an uneasy half-shriek, half-whisper. “Helbrede! Helbrede! Helbrede!”
“Aaah!” Monika groaned, slouching forward. She jumped, as if snapping out of a nightmare, and shot me a scowl. “Stop!”
The incantation resonated in my mind, bounced off my cranium’s walls, and sunk back into my brain, as I watched the injured flesh tremble and move, closing around the wound. The skin was slowly growing back, healthy and unharmed, dancing around the crimson that glistened under the chandelier’s lights. My heart raced with it, trying to outrun the speed of the healing process.
Monika ran her other hand over her palm. The wound immediately closed before my eyes. She wiped the residual blood with the tissues, then groaned again.
“Why the hell did you do that?”
“I… magic… what?” I replied inadequately.
“This! Why did you heal me?”
“I… you… were bleeding.”
“I was in a blood trance!”
With a clenched jaw, she jumped off the bed, and started pacing around the room in circles. My panic slowly made way for my common sense to return.
“You were doing blood magic?”
“Trying to,” she corrected me before sitting down. “Sorry for snapping, I was just getting close.”
“Getting close to what?”
“Never mind, you’ll understand in time. Why aren’t you with Patricia Svensson working on your evocation?”
“I wasn’t in the mood for jumping from a window,” I made a reference to her friend.
“Learyn, it’s mandatory!”
“Geez, what am I? The Council’s pre-programmed robot?”
A sudden blow of irritation hit me, erasing my relief of seeing her unharmed and erasing the wonder of succeeding in performing magic. Controlled magic, magic used for good, not a crazy accident.
I walked over to the scattered books, gathered them in a pile, and placed them on my bed. Obviously, I couldn’t do anything properly even when I tried to do the right thing. The Draug and Monika’s reaction proved it.
“What’s all this?” she asked, coming over.
“Bedtime stories,” I muttered sarcastically, already skimming through one of the volumes.
“Hey, I’m sorry. I was close to fi
nally falling into the trance. So, I got angry and frustrated when you interrupted it.”
A loud sigh rolled out of me.
“I kinda freaked out when I saw you shivering with your hand slashed like that. You didn’t need my help, and I ruined your… whatever blood trance is supposed to be. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll practice later. What’s up with the books?”
“I’m trying to find out how my parents died. These are the books containing my father’s name.”
Monika browsed through the titles before shaking her head. “You won’t find the book here. Their death is chronicled in another one.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I read about it in another book.”
I grabbed her shoulders. “How did they die? What did they summon? Why did they summon it?”
“Girlie, chill!” Her hands shot in the air, palms facing me. “The book didn’t say they summoned something. It only mentioned they joined an Asian coven’s attempts to keep safeguarding Midgard from otherworldly threats.”
“They died in Asia, protecting us from otherworldly threats?” I asked in surprise. As far as I knew, the night they passed away, they were flying back from a business trip in the US.
“I didn’t say they died in Asia.”
She bit her thumb, avoiding my eyes for some reason. I did everything I could to prevent myself from pressing her, and waited for the answers, growing more impatient.
“There’s a realm beyond our own, called Carlynder. Wanderers discovered it during the Middle Ages. It’s a wasteland inhabited by nasty beings, who colonize other realms. The presence of Midgardians made them set their sight on our world. An Asian coven of sorcerers found a way to ward off Carlynderians, and your parents joined them in their quest to defend our world from being colonized. They died in Carlynder, not in our realm.”
“Okay, this is getting way too Stars Wars for me.” I pushed a hand through my hair and pouted. “Why would my parents go to another realm?”
“Isn’t it obvious? To cut the head of the snake.”
“But Geira Brekke told me they died in a summoning accident.”
Monika shrugged. “Maybe they did summon something, but it wasn’t chronicled.”
I opened the volume containing family trees and skimmed to the last page with Dustrikke family members. The right side held the names of Doran Dustrikke, a man born in the Roaring Twenties, and his brother Edor, born in the nineties of the nineteenth century. Judging by the branches above their names, they had to be my very, very, very distant cousins. Or something like it.
Doran and Edor were apparently still alive, because there were no death dates across their birth ones.
“What if they know what happened?” I asked quietly, sticking my index finger on Edor and Doran. “Is there some way to find out where they live? My aunt mentioned I have distant relatives in Europe. Maybe they’re in Scandinavia?”
“If they are, they definitely don’t want to be found. I’ve never seen a Dustrikke in necromantic societies, and I’ve never heard them making an appearance in supernatural societies in general. At least not in the past two decades. It’s a little weird because they’re celebrated more than kings and queens. The legacy they left behind… Oh, boy! My mother would kill me for saying this, but Hallvard Nordstrøm and his family will never be as great as yours, no matter how hard they try.”
“Thanks,” I muttered and got up to stack the books in a neat pile on our desk.
But what I was really doing was hiding my face.
The dark secret I’d been dreading was now crystal clear. My ancestors were badass, and I was simply bad. Bad at everything – from magic to human interaction. Like clockwork, the Eitrhals painfully pressed down on my chest.
Monika was right. There was no use of these books. I didn’t need to discover my family’s greatness and praised achievements. What I needed to do was focus on not staining my family’s legacy again.
And that meant it was time to stop avoiding evocation.
***
Regardless of my poor opinion of the three Nordstrøms, I entered the auditorium the next morning.
When Dann walked in, our eyes met. He didn’t seem bothered anymore by my comment from last week. His calm expression helped me ease a little bit, alleviating my prejudice that I had gotten myself into serious trouble by calling him a snobbish dick. On top of spewing all the other crap at him.
“Can anyone remember what I promised you last time?”
A hand flew up, two rows ahead of me.
“Yes, Miss Nilsen?”
“Ice giants,” replied a sugary voice.
Clapping and hoots of approval erupted from behind me. A group of guys seemed just as eager as Miss Nilsen for today’s lecture.
I rolled my eyes. Leave it to His Excellency to excite an audience about History. Too bad the nickname Snobbish Dick suited him as much as the other one.
“Settle down, please. All right, ice giants. Before we delve into epic tales and glorious battles, let’s go over some backstory. Ice giants are the primary form of life in the realm Niflheim. As some of you might know, Niflheim, along with the other primordial realm, Muspelheim, forms the stream of creation, also known as eitr essence, or the quintessence which fills our souls and gives us our magical core.”
Good thing I knew at least that.
“Having its fundamental role in our creation in mind, it’s only natural that there’s a plethora of myths and superstitions surrounding this realm. Can anyone tell me one such alleged fact about Niflheim, which has been proven to be nothing but a myth?”
“It’s the tenth circle of hell specially reserved for Álfar mutts like Vee?”
Aagard, that annoying asshole, made everyone turn their heads to the hybrid elf girl, who was sitting only a few chairs away from me. Echoing laughter erupted from the back rows. Vee’s face became a replica of that tormented expression she had when I first saw her – after her failed attempt to Aperture more than her wrist.
Thanks to the same guy, now she was once again suffering in silence.
“Hey, shitface!” I yelled in Aagard’s direction. “Just because her ears are pointy and probably happen to be bigger than your dick, it doesn’t give you the right to insult her!”
Razzing, booing and woohoo-ing mixed with the laughter, bouncing off every hard surface in the auditorium.
“Silence!” Dann’s voice magically established order with a single word. “Mr. Aagard, Miss Dustrikke, I’ll deal with you after the lecture is over. Miss Selvig, I’d like for you to join them as well.”
I had no clue who was the latter one, but judging by Aagard’s furious glare, it was probably someone from his circle of buddies.
“Despite Mr. Aagard’s inappropriate statement, he did mention one of the most popular myths surrounding Niflheim. Scholars often mistaken it for a hellish underworld, and erroneously pinpoint the location of the goddess Hel’s eponymous habitat, also known as Helheim, in Niflheim. Helheim is located in a different realm, and Niflheim is not the realm of hell, but the one of mist and ice. Having this in mind, it’s obvious why humans would perceive it as a hellish place. But let’s not forget Niflheim gave life to the Hvergelmir spring, from which all rivers rose; and also to the stream of creation in the place where its primordial rime met with Muspelheim’s primordial fire. If you stop to think about it, really think about it, Niflheim is the exact opposite of a wasteland ruled by icy desolation.”
I had to admit it once again; Maksim was right about Dann’s excellent lecturing. His Excellency made such an effortless transition into the subject, it seemed almost as if Aagard hadn’t spewed any racist remarks and interrupted the lecture.
When it was over and everyone left, I walked to the podium holding Dann’s desk, followed by the two other attendees he had called. Miss Selvig wasn’t one of Aagard’s buddies.
It was Vee.
I peeked at her in confusion as to why she was detained wi
th us. She shifted her eyes between Aagard and Dann wildly for a few moments. Then, without any warning, she burst into tears. It took less than a second for His Excellency to jump on his feet, go around his desk, and put his hands over her shoulders. She hid her face in her palms and shook her head.
“You haven’t done anything wrong, Vee, please calm down.”
Dann spoke softly and quietly, unlike the way Marcus Dahl had reprimanded her, before he had also started comforting her physically.
A cold lump dropped in my throat. I imagined how embarrassed she must have felt, tearing down twice in front of an audience, on top of being bullied. I wanted to go over there and tell her I knew what it was like to feel overemotional, and how it wasn’t her fault that people were shitty.
“Please go in the back room to compose yourself while I have a word with our troublemakers.”
She whimpered, nodded, and went through a door behind the desk, which I hadn’t even noticed up until today. Before I could gather my own thoughts, Dann took a step towards us, inhaled sharply, and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Learyn, I have taught many troublesome students through the years, but you are a marvel of acrimonious vulgarity.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Thanks?”
“You’ve been to my lectures twice and spit more profanities than I’d care to hear for an entire month. Defending your friends is honorable, but your vile language and desire to disrupt the discipline will get you in trouble.”
Cute. The guy thought we were in one of his schools.
“Am I not already in trouble?” I asked, raising my eyebrows even higher. “Should I try harder?”
“Your sarcasm isn’t amusing. I’ll allow you a third strike. As for you, Heimir,” he glanced at Aagard, “your strikes have been too many. I will not allow such behavior on this island, least of all during my own lectures. The Council will see you tonight.”
“Whatever. Your uncle can’t–”
“Dismissed!” Dann’s raspy voice cracked like a whip, much like last week after I had called him a snobbish dick. “Both of you!”
