by Amy B. Nixon
The whole room had grown silent. Just as I thought at least one Council member would have a change of heart, Dann spoke.
“The ventilation shafts won’t lead you to an escape route.”
If His Excellency thought he was being helpful, I sincerely hoped I never had to rely on him for something as intrinsic as breaking out of captivity.
“And what if I need to go shopping?” I decided to play the female card. “You’ll force me to shop for clothes online, and go through my underwear delivery to make sure I’m not using bra pads to smuggle something new that will endanger lives?”
As soon as I finished the sentence, I imagined Hallvard Nordstrøm’s shriveled face in my underwear drawer. My body contracted with shudders of disgust. Did I have to open my big mouth? Now there was no fucking way I could ever un-see that mental picture.
Since no one bothered to answer my biting remarks, I decided to take a different course of action and speak the truth.
“Will someone at least tell me why I’m not allowed to leave? If this was Aurora or Monika, they wouldn’t have to beg for a free pass, regardless of the incident with the Nøkk. Look, all I want is to go visit my aunt for a day or two; not to get myself or anyone in trouble. I promise.”
“We cannot let you on the loose. Our decision is final.”
“Let me on the loose? Considering how deadly the Nøkken accident was, I’m not going to run off to sunbathe on a Norwegian beach! Please, let me leave for a day. I’ll go straight to San Francisco and then come back here. I haven’t been able to reach my aunt over the phone these past few days, and I need to see her. Please! I’m worried. Even if she’s just lost her phone and gotten a new number, she knows mine by heart. She would have called me today. It’s my twenty-first birthday.”
No one seemed to give a damn about the vexation in my voice. Apparently, I had to explain how close I’d been with the only living relative I still had. Or at least I had been close with her, up until she revealed my entire life had been a lie.
As I was about to start pleading like I had never done before, Dann spoke again. “Learyn, your aunt is lost.”
“What do you mean by lost?”
“Adaline Dustrikke is dead,” Monika’s mom took over.
“I normally appreciate dark humor, but this is so not the time for it. Let me go see her. Please! You can even appoint guards to accompany me for the trip if you want to.”
“This isn’t a joke,” Hallvard joined in on the crazy wagon.
“Oh, come ooon!” I groaned. “If you’re going to give me hell for everything I’ve pulled so far, at least don’t use my aunt when doing it!”
“We are serious, Miss Dustrikke.”
He definitely appeared to be serious. Then again, when you were a two-hundred-year-old mummy, there were few expressions you could produce without pulling a facial muscle.
Johanna Larsen took over before I came up with another remark. “We had suspicions when we lost touch with her in November, approximately three weeks after your arrival.”
“Well, you lost touch with her eight years ago, and she wasn’t dead then either!”
“What happened back then was a deliberate effort on your family’s end to keep hiding you by making everyone believe your branch of the Dustrikke bloodline had ceased to exist. This time, Adaline was honest with me.”
“Yeah, right! What makes you think she’s not hiding again?”
“She was indeed hiding in November, but not from us. We communicated with her every day.”
“Hiding from what?” I asked Johanna Larsen the same old million-dollar question.
“We have a reason to believe it could be the same thing that took the lives of your other relatives.”
“What other relatives?”
“Doran and Edor Dustrikke, your third cousins, four times removed from your father’s side of the family.”
I’d seen those names on a family tree. One of them was born in the late nineteenth century, while the other was born in the Roaring Twenties.
“I traced my family tree in the library, and they were alive just a… a…” A few weeks ago, I concluded silently. Before the Council lost touch with my aunt. “But that means my aunt and I are… We’re…”
“Precisely,” Monika’s mother noted, interrupting my stutter. “You are the last remaining descendant of the Dustrikke bloodline.”
“Descendants! Plural.”
“Adaline Dustrikke is lost.”
I threw my hands in the air, vexing with frustration.
“Stop saying that! Just because she hasn’t Skyped you or sent you blood messages, or whatever, it doesn’t mean she’s dead!”
But Mrs. Larsen was relentless in her crazy theory.
“Miss Dustrikke, we have proof you are the last one bearing the Dustrikke name. I personally sought audience with our goddess Freya of the Vanir. She confirmed the souls of Doran and Edor Dustrikke to be within her plains in Asgard.”
“What killed them?”
“They sacrificed themselves, thus preventing the loss of more lives.”
“What the hell does that even mean, apart from suicide?”
“There has been an otherworldly shadow cast upon Midgard since time immemorial, Miss Dustrikke. You need not concern yourself with it. You are perfectly safe within the bounds of this island.”
“And my aunt? Why couldn’t she come to Norway when she sent me here? Couldn’t you offer her protection? What about now? Can’t you offer her protection now?”
“Adaline Dustrikke is no longer in this realm. The goddess confirmed it herself.”
The fuck? My aunt wasn’t in Midgard? She wasn’t on this planet?
“Well, can you bring her back to Midgard?”
“Please try to understand your aunt is dead, Miss Dustrikke. Whilst her soul and spirit are lost to us, we assure you, her corporeal remains rest in safety.”
Soul and spirit are lost… Corporeal remains…
My eyes landed on Dann’s sullen gaze and the silent, but unmistakable confirmation it held.
I stumbled backwards, distancing myself from the nine Council members. Her corporeal remains meant her… her… I choked on the word corpse even as I thought about it. Her soul and spirit were lost to necromancers. A man is not dead unless his soul is lost. And hers was. To them, and to our maker.
My heart dropped in my stomach. A stinging, cold sensation took over the empty hole where my most vital organ was supposed to be. Frostbite. First it settled into my ribcage, then it spread across the rest of my body.
I felt dizzy, and instinctively closed my eyes.
When I opened them, my legs bent and I fell, hitting something hard and uneven. Stairs. I was sitting in the middle of a staircase.
I screamed.
I screamed for each time I had wanted to punch something or someone, but had kept holding back. I screamed for the incandescence of my wrath, for the blazing agony of my heartache, for the burning acid of my disappointment, for the flaming reds of my embarrassment, for the fervent aching of the lies.
All of these fucking lies. The ones I told myself, the ones I told everyone else, and the ones which came from the people I had allowed to get close to me.
And then I kept screaming.
I didn’t know when every cell in my being had stopped screaming from rage and started screaming from pain. I didn’t even know when my way to the corridor on the bottom of the staircase was cut off by a line of blazing flames. I didn’t know where I was, how I had teleported, or where Aperture had taken me. I didn’t know how much time had passed.
At some point, my body felt sore. My vocal cords were ripped out of my throat. The air was sucked out of my lungs. I crawled to the nearest wall, pressed my temple against the cold stone, and pulled out my phone.
Now I knew the reason why it hadn’t buzzed to life. Because the one who was supposed to ring, was dead.
My fingers dialed her number.
“Hello, you’ve reached Addie. I
can’t pick up right now.”
The beep sound followed. I didn’t know what to say. All I wanted was to hear her voice, so I disconnected, then redialed.
“Hello, you’ve reached Addie. I can’t pick up right now.”
My thumb touched the red circle after the beep and redialed again.
“Hello, you’ve reached Addie. I can’t pick up right now.”
I kept doing the same thing over and over until the operator tuned in, replacing my aunt’s pre-recorded message, and announced the voicemail’s inbox was full.
Disconnecting one final time, I put the phone in my pocket. It was as useless as my magic.
I was supposed to be a necromancer. Necromancers could live for two hundred years and bring their beloved ones back from the dead. Necromancers were supposed to rule over death. Necromancers were supposed to possess the gift of life.
But apparently none of it mattered. Necromancy was useless, because it couldn’t bring back my family.
I couldn’t stay on this island any longer. Staring blankly into the nothingness, I became more and more convinced there was no place for me here.
I had nowhere to go, no idea what to do, but I had to leave.
And do what? I was literally back to square one. No, not one, but zero. Zero chance of staying sane and not losing my shit for more than a second at a time. Zero chance of living up to the expectations of being a great Dustrikke necromancer, because necromancers were useless anyway. Zero chance of seeing my aunt and apologizing for the childish bitch I had been to her on that stupid November night.
Hey, at least you have nothing more to lose, so what’s the worst that could happen from now on?
I laughed drily. My sick sense of humor had kicked in.
A set of approaching footsteps pulled me out of my lethargy. Someone was walking down the corridor on the staircase’s lower end.
The flames had simmered down. They weren’t high and thick enough, and I could make out Dann’s familiar face. How had he found me? And why hadn’t he done it sooner? Like when I had been screaming with such rage, the flames could have burned him to a cinder? He would have deserved it for hiding the truth, like every other Council member.
“Go away!” I hissed.
He approached the bottom of the stairs. I growled out the air in my lungs, and the flames grew to a thicker, denser barrier.
“Get the fuck away from me!”
“I’m sorry you had to learn this way. It was safer for you to remain in the dark.”
“You’ve known this entire time, haven’t you?” I screamed, but what came out of my throat was something hoarse, barely echoing over the flames. “I trusted you, and you kept the truth from me, like the rest of those heartless… heartless…”
I couldn’t even finish, shocked from the way my flames were parting, making way for him. What the actual fuck? What was he doing to my fire element? How was he doing it? That was impossible!
“Wha–”
I panted, unable to catch my breath. He stepped in the opening. I gathered every ounce of energy in my being, begging my core, my magic and my Eitrhals to bring back the coldness of Aperture.
Nothing happened.
I bolted for the upper landing, but made only a few steps before he caught up, throwing his arms around me.
“Let me go!”
I barely had the strength to find my voice, but I tried to push him away again and again, each time to no avail. His arms just tightened. I finally gave in, breaking in tears like the helpless little girl I had been all along.
He dropped on the stairs, and the last of my walls crumbled and literally fell with him. His body took in my convulsions as I kept crying, tugged neatly in his arms like a fucking baby. That’s exactly what I was. Just a grown baby, who was trying to stop acting like a kid, who had lost everyone and everything, while the world expected me to live up to a famous family’s name. I was nothing but a failure. A failure who didn’t belong anywhere – not here, not in San Francisco, and most definitely not in the Dustrikke family tree.
Who had I been kidding? I couldn’t even fool myself anymore, let alone pretend for the sake of not appearing weak and broken in front of others. I had no place in this castle, in this country, even on this continent.
“I-I can’t… t-teleport. Let me g-go. I n-need to leave.”
“You can’t leave.”
His uneven whisper didn’t sound like the harsh command I expected.
“Why? B-because I’m the last D-Dustrikke? I’m un-unworthy for that n-name!”
“You’re more precious and powerful than you think.”
Pfft! Yeah, sure! It couldn’t be true. I made a mess out of everything, and I most definitely wasn’t some magical prodigy who exceeded at being a Class Five necromancer.
“M-my family was… but t-they’re dead now. All of t-them. Like t-that girl. The g-guards. T-the swallow. Everyone around me d-dies!”
He pushed one of his hands into my hair, keeping the other wrapped around me. My anger made way to confusion. Why was he doing that? Why was he comforting me? I didn’t deserve it.
“I d-didn’t even tell her I’m s-sorry. I-I started a f-fucking fight with h-her and n-now it’s too late!”
He didn’t say anything, just kept taking in my convulsions, showing me kindness and sympathy. I was nothing more than a rule-breaker with a short fuse, a sailor’s mouth and a bull-headed attitude. I didn’t deserve to be comforted. Not by him, not by anyone. Not when I did my best to fuck everything up and push people away. And behind all of my sarcasm, rage and snappy remarks, I knew it was the truth.
I knew it, and it crushed me.
“D-Dann, how d-do you tell s-someone you’re s-sorry when they’re dead a-and it’s too late? It’s s-so fucking late now! Why d-do people even s-say sorry, when sorry doesn’t c-cut it? It’s n-not nearly enough! It’s j-just a s-stupid word! It’s n-not enough!”
His arms wreathed around my waist and shoulders, and he cradled me while I buried my face in his shoulder, trying to hide my despair. Hiding it was pointless, since it was already pouring from my words and actions.
“When I was fifteen, I lost both of my parents. They took me and my sister on vacation in France for the summer. Varg werewolves working for a coven of casters sniffed us out, attacked us and tore them open, so the casters could extract their souls’ eitr essence.”
I gasped at his sudden revelation, and his embrace immediately tightened.
“I accidentally Apertured myself and Aurora back home, completely out of fear. It was the first time I did it, and I couldn’t do it again for a while, no matter how hard I tried or how many Aperture teachers oversaw my attempts. Aurora had it worse. She couldn’t speak for months, regardless of the Healers and sorcerers we called in. Similarly to you, my sister and I were expected to do great things because we bear the name Nordstrøm. Nobody seemed to notice we were merely a couple of scared children, who had just seen their parents get brutally murdered.”
So, that’s why he had said he had an idea of what I might be going through after that questionnaire.
I sighed and managed to pull back a little bit, finally able to actually look him in the eyes. Through the prism of my tears, he wasn’t Dann Nordstrøm, the excellent lecturer, or Dann Nordstrøm, the guy who fought with trained guards. He wasn’t Dann Nordstrøm, the Snobbish Dick, or Dann Nordstrøm, the Council member with whom those ancients consulted.
He was just Dann, simply Dann, and I saw in him the ghost of a broken boy who had endured more crap than his exterior ever showed.
“But… we’re necromancers.” My voice came out so quiet, I wondered if I had indeed spoken. “It-it shouldn’t be like this.”
“We’re not invincible, and there are many ways to take a life irrevocably.”
He didn’t say it in that amiable, preceptorial and instructive tone he used during lectures. He just sounded… woeful.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, wishing there was something more I could say.
I was sorry about his parents, I was sorry for trying to run away, I was sorry for him seeing me cry. Most of all, I was sorry he had to sit here, comforting me, instead of dealing with important things.
“Unkindly enough, we seem to forget what it’s like to be human, even if it’s merely a small part of us.”
He lifted a hand and slowly brushed his fingers over my cheek, erasing a new tear that had just escaped my eyes. The warmth of his skin and the kind gesture felt soothing and calming, helping me bite back another tear.
“That’s why I gave you the Svipdagsmál poems, so you’d see how even in fiction, magic and necromancy don’t equal a carefree life without hardships and sorrow. And I also thought you’d relate to Svipdag.”
Silently, I closed my eyes and lowered my head in an attempt to hide my feelings.
For nearly a year, I had secretly wished for someone genuinely kind, good and compassionate to see what no one else saw. To see something in me that was… worth it. I had wished it so badly, but then again, I had tried to hide it even from myself out of fear of seeking someone’s approval. I had already disappointed everyone, including myself, too many times.
“Learyn, don’t look away. You’re capable of more than you’re giving yourself credit for. Your power doesn’t come just from your ancestors. It also comes from your heart.”
Wow. Like, really wow! Did he seriously think that of me?
Right on cue, as if I had voiced my thoughts, he caught my face, prompting me to open my eyes. It was impossible for me to peel my eyes off him, even if I wanted to. Because the reassuring look he gave me almost made me believe it, believe in his words, believe in myself.
He looked at me the way no one before him had ever done. He looked at me the way I secretly wanted to be looked at. Long ago, in those times when I had asked myself if I was the worst person on the planet, when every friendly and romantic relationship in my life always ended miserably. He looked at me like I wasn’t the reason for this misery. He looked at me like I didn’t deserve to be looked at. Like there really was something more to me than vulgar outbursts and a string of failures.
