She bet it would feel really good.
“I thought you handled all that really well.” Opal adjusted her grip on the steering wheel as she merged her Honda Fit onto I-5 North from 22 West. “I know it was hard to be around everyone at the party. But you really opened yourself up, laid yourself bare. Seriously impressive.”
Sally didn’t feel remotely impressive. She stared out the window at the passing trees against the night sky. Saga had remained largely mute and unflinching as Sally laid into her. Maybe Sally wanted to get punched, too. She’d basically offered everyone a shot at her. But even Thor’s words to Sally seemed aimed at reconciliation instead of simmering outrage. After he’d punched Loki, of course.
She’d made a fool of herself. She went to the party thinking she wanted to make amends and surprised herself by inviting punishment. The words she’d flung at Saga flew back at her now, cutting and stinging. But she blinked and kept her breathing even. That helped.
“It’s hard to lose someone close to you, especially someone with so much influence and power in a close-knit family.” Opal eased into the left lane to pass another agricultural truck. “But when it’s two of them at the same time, the grief and anger and everything wrapped up in that experience must be unfathomable. Sometimes people act out.”
“Huh.” Sally wanted to interject and remind Opal that everyone else’s grief was probably deeper than her own and that they should all be furious with her. Sally wasn’t blood kin to anyone in the Lodge. Other than the Rune Witch mantle she’d inherited, did they have any true obligation to her? At least they’d snarfed up her cookie-muffins, after her outburst.
Guilt cookies.
Sally dug her fingernails into her palm and let the pain take a bite out of her angst. “She should have laid into me.”
Opal blew out a half-hearted chuckle. “What I’m trying to say is that while that kind of behavior is understandable, even excusable, you would have been within your rights to punch Loki. After the way he set things in motion for that wilderness quest, even if he didn’t mean for everything to happen like it did . . . Hell, I wanted to hit him. And I know you wanted to, too.”
Sally stretched her fingers out long and let her hands rest flat on the tops of her thighs. “I cannot confirm or deny that assertion, Senator.”
Opal chuckled and drove the next mile or so in silence. Then she said, “Still, I’m sorry for the way they treated you.”
A late-model Mustang with racing stripes sped past them and wove in and out of the fleet of trucks that typically traveled Oregon’s highways at night.
“Maybe I should have stepped in and said something. Earlier.” Opal paused. “It’s just that Maggie has very distinct ideas on how she wants things done right now.”
Sally’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her back pocket and blew out an incredulous sigh. “Text from Loki.”
Meet @ usual place. 1 AM. Bring ur imagination + adventurous sprt.
“You have got to be kidding me.” Sally really hoped he meant ‘spirit,’ because what the hell was an ‘adventurous spurt’?
“Bad news?”
“How much trouble do you think I’d get into if I simply ignored him?”
Her phone buzzed again. Read rcpts on. Know msg recd. C U shortly.
“Okay. New plan.” Sally dropped the phone in her lap and started flexing her fingers. “How would you feel about a little engine trouble?”
She reached toward the dashboard. The car swerved a bit as Opal swatted her hands away.
“That is not even funny, Sally!” Opal straightened the vehicle and drove on. “It took weeks before you’d get in the car so as not to risk everything going haywire, and now you want to go wrecking things on purpose? If you want to get out of whatever Loki’s texting you about, figure it out on your own.”
She snapped on the radio and turned up the volume on the public broadcasting station airing the BBC World Report.
Sally went back to staring out the window. Listening to a story about France sending warships to the Middle East, she drummed her fingers on the armrest and watched the trees and farmland flicker past in the darkness.
She was itching to do something. She didn’t feel like indulging her mentor in more magickal practice—especially in the woods in the middle of the night, and more especially when she had classes the next morning. But shooting chaos rays at autumn leaves or whatever he wanted her to do would keep her from sitting around the apartment and stewing. She wasn’t too keen on her morning class in Scandinavian folklore anyway. Wasn’t she already living it every day?
“Sorry.” Sally kept her face turned to the window glass. “I’m just tired, I guess.”
“It’s okay,” Opal replied quickly. “We’ll be back in Portland in about an hour. Do you have time before you have to do whatever with Loki? How about hot chocolate and a movie?”
And then blowing off some magickal steam in the woods.
“Sure,” Sally said.
Loki couldn’t remember the last time he felt genuine excitement.
His nose throbbed painfully and a tender patch below his left eye had swollen up despite the ice he’d kept pressed to his face. He was surprised nothing was broken. His vision was unaffected, and he still had all his teeth. Thor must have pulled his punch.
And then Thor laughed, his steam vented. He didn’t immediately clap Loki on the shoulder or give a hint as to what was behind the burst of violence, though Loki knew he’d been stewing on it for a good long while.
But Loki’s injury was a small matter compared to what he’d learned at the Winter Nights party. No one had heard from Frigga or Odin. He might yet have a chance. It was a slim possibility, but he had to try.
He sat in the combined living, dining, and study area of his tiny house and leafed through the pages of four worn journals and as many rare books. He jotted his findings onto the blank pages of a fresh journal.
His cozy home sat on a sheltered plot along the southern edge of Forest Park, not far from Portland State University but not too close to Sally’s apartment. With a tall, rambling hedge on all sides, the house was hidden from both sight and sound. The perfect refuge for an old hermit wanting to keep tabs on his apprentice.
Loki looked up at the close ceiling. He’d paid scant attention to Freya’s Call of the Einherjar a few years earlier when the Lodge was in desperate need of reinforcements against Managarm and his Berserkers. Now Freya was deep in the Three Sisters Wilderness and leading her brother through a daily series of lava exercises—or whatever she was doing to help him get comfortable in his new volcano home. There was no telling when she might be back in Portland, and she wasn’t taking calls. Not Loki’s calls, anyway.
He’d pieced together enough of her ritual from memory, and now he filled in the gaps and added detail from his own experience and from the histories of several powerful chaos practitioners whose names had faded from every memory but Loki’s.
Sally hadn’t seen these volumes. She wasn’t ready. He endeavored to impress upon her how much more complex the world’s magickal ecosystem was than she believed it to be. But even after her many trials by fire, she continued to rely on what someone else told her or what she’d read in a dusty old book instead of fully trusting her own instincts and power.
It was good progress that she’d developed a distrust of popularly published grimoires, but chaos made her nervous. She was venturing into new territory but reverting to old habits, asking about online tutorials whose “experts” oversimplified and offered largely unimportant truisms that covered only a small fraction of the actual mechanisms at work.
How long would it take her to learn that chaos was familiar ground?
Very few had the capacity to work with chaos. Human history was littered with examples of mortals who tried to harness chaos magick and failed. The lucky ones ended up disillusioned or permanently maimed; others died for their efforts. Most ended up in psychiatric institutions.
He didn’t want to scare her. He
wanted her to try. He wanted her to fail and learn and try again. No single book or teacher would be able to guide her for long. Loki had been at the center of the chaos storm for the entirety of his existence and even he was still learning and discovering.
But trying to convince a human teenager of anything was an uphill battle.
Perhaps after they attempted the working he was designing, after she’d gotten a closer glimpse of the depth of her magick, then she’d understand the rarity of her opportunity and gifts.
Loki scanned his hand-written pages. There were some troubling gaps and he wasn’t sure how to fill them. He was making calculations regardless of moon phases or planetary alignments or the other external factors most magicians took into consideration. It had been so long since he’d worked from written castings, and organized spellwork had never been his forte. This level of planning was more Sally’s area, but there was a near one-hundred-percent likelihood that she’d refuse to come anywhere near his pages if she got an early whiff of what he was up to.
Even so, he wouldn’t wing it. This work was too important and too delicate to throw something together without triple-checking everything. Sally would be tapping into another realm where the magickal laws of mortals and Midgard didn’t reliably apply.
He pulled another heavy tome from the narrow bookshelf that took up an entire wall of precious space. He scribbled notes in the margins of his journal and started filling in the holes with bulleted lists. Some of it he’d have no choice but to leave to chance. Sally’s intuition would kick in, and she’d supply the missing pieces. It would all be fine. It had to be.
He could delay a day or two to allow for fact-checking and perhaps a test run. Winter Nights would stretch for several more days. But Loki decided it was better to strike while the iron of Sally’s anger was hot. Her emotions were running high with indignation, frustration, and even shame. She wouldn’t welcome his intentions, not initially. But this was the chance for both of them to set things right and he was wagering that once triggered, Sally would be eager for some good old-fashioned venting through magickal practice.
If not, this night’s work would be for nothing. Because there was no way Loki could attempt this without her.
Sally stood within the circle of runes and sigils Loki had drawn in the dirt. It was dark in the woods, but she could see enough to know the patterns were both complicated and hastily drawn. She wanted a closer look at them before she started on any kind of working, but Loki had pushed a few sheets of paper into her hands and shoved her into the center of the circle.
“Just read from the paper.” Loki’s voice was calm and even, but he also sounded congested. His nose was swollen and had started to purple. Sally was surprised a punch from Thor hadn’t sent him to the hospital.
“You want me to launch in without reading it through?” She rattled the pages toward the symbols scrawled in the dirt. “I’m not comfortable standing in someone else’s rune circle, especially when I’m not allowed to examine what’s surrounding me.”
Loki dipped his head, his habit to indicate that she’d been heard. But she knew he was about to deny her.
“And what has your experience to date taught you about such preparations, in terms of comparing expectations to the results that are gained?” He paced slowly around the outside of the circle, his gait measured and maddening.
Sally blew out a sigh and resisted the temptation to stamp her foot. She didn’t know the intention beneath the sigil patterns and she wouldn’t risk adding her personal frustration to the magickal mix. There weren’t any candles, lit or unlit, and she wasn’t sure that was a good sign.
“That nothing goes as planned,” she said at last.
“That nothing goes as planned,” Loki echoed. “And why do you think that is?”
“Because apparently I’m made of freaking chaos!” Sally’s irritation rose through the tree branches. She crumpled the pages. “Can’t we just do some target practice or something?”
“Target practice?”
“Yeah, where you set up a pyramid of pinecones and I see if I can use chaos to knock them over from twenty paces.”
Loki stopped his circling and looked at her with an expression of confused curiosity. “Where did you get the idea we would engage in any such activity?”
Sally shrugged and tried not to look as sullen as she felt. “I just thought it would be cool.”
“May we return to our primary purpose?”
Sally smoothed out the pages. She pulled a penlight from her jacket pocket and almost smiled in relief when it turned on instead of fizzling out. “Just give me a minute.”
“No.” Loki’s command stopped Sally cold. “It is time for you to let go. Let your magick flow through you without worrying about what comes next.”
“You want me to trust you.” She couldn’t help her narrowed eyes or the hard edge of her voice.
Was Loki truly her friend? It seemed like he was, but then he’d put her life in danger and explain later that it was for her own good. How many times had he done that now? He was a dangerous ally, and now he was asking her to cast an unknown spell and refusing to tell her what it was supposed to accomplish.
Loki smiled. “I want you to trust yourself without having to ask questions. I saw you do it once, at the IKEA warehouse in Norway.”
Sally felt a chill run the length of her body, and it wasn’t unpleasant. She’d taken aim at a Køjer Devil and shot it down with a spontaneous energy blast before it could kill Freyr. She’d felt powerful, and more than a little afraid of herself. She hadn’t tried anything like it since.
“I would like you to open up to that again, now,” he said. “You may not always find yourself in circumstances that allow the luxury of careful consideration before action is required.”
“You don’t want me to kill anybody, do you?” Sally glanced at the first page. It looked like a Winter Nights remembrance ritual for Frigga and Odin. The structure seemed simple, but it made her uneasy that Loki was being more vague than usual.
“Do you believe I would ask you to cause harm to anyone? Without revealing as much to you first?”
“No.”
He resumed his slow pace around the outside of the circle. Sally glanced at the pages torn from his journal. Training with him these last months hadn’t erased what happened in the Three Sisters Wilderness. Odin, Frigga, and Nanitch were all dead and Loki’s shenanigans nearly got Sally killed, too. From her sparking fingers to her cold reception at the Lodge, it was easy to lay blame at Loki’s feet.
She read down to the bottom of the first page. “This is for Odin and Frigga.”
Loki nodded as he passed in front of her on his way around the circle.
She skimmed over the second page. “This is . . . You want to open a pathway, between the living and the dead?” She turned to face him as he continued his pacing. “What is this?”
Loki stopped and clasped his hands together.
“Odin and Frigga haven’t been heard from.” He nodded toward the pages in her hands. “This is to ensure that they are all right. In a manner of speaking.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Sally parroted his words back at him. “And you don’t want me reading ahead to the end.”
“That is correct.”
“And it doesn’t matter that I’m really uncomfortable with this?”
“Life is not an exercise in comfort. If you will proceed with the working as it is laid out, you will appreciate the need for spontaneity once you reach the end.”
“And you promise you’re not trying to kill anyone.” Sally’s smirk was meant to break the tension, but she felt a creeping unease in her body and it wasn’t the chill from being out in the woods in the middle of the night in late October.
“That I can and do promise you.”
Sally knew that was the best she would get from him. She lifted the pages and her penlight. She began reading aloud.
It took a solid twenty minutes of stumbling over his handw
ritten words to get to the last page of Loki’s working. After the first page, most of it was an odd mixture of ancient languages Sally could only guess at. Only some of it was old Norse. Every time she paused, worried about butchering a pronunciation, Loki motioned her onward with uncharacteristic impatience.
She’d never known Loki to work from notes. When she thought about it—in the few pauses that were scripted into the spell—she hadn’t seen Loki use magick ever.
Her penlight started to flicker. She heard a twig snap in the woods about a meter away. She glanced at Loki, and his pointed look pushed her forward. She continued reading aloud. She made a few gestures in the air as called for in Loki’s notes, and she almost laughed when she saw fading lines of golden light trailing the movements of her fingers, as though she were writing her name with a lit sparkler. That was new, and it was kind of neat.
A sudden wind whirled around her, and she lost sight of Loki. Dead leaves and bits of bark flew at Sally’s face, but she didn’t leave her place at the center of Loki’s rune circle. All of the spellwork pages but one were ripped out of her hands by the wind, and her fingers sparked pale pink and purple with unspent energy. She held tight to the last page and shouted to be heard above the howling wind.
“Hail! Step through the door that has been opened! Follow this bóglína, sigla Midgard!”
A flying stick nicked Sally’s chin and she turned to put her back to the wind, but it swirled and whipped around her from all directions. The tight beam of her penlight spluttered. She was surprised it had lasted this long. She reached the last line of Loki’s working, a repetition of the line before. She lifted her face to the wind and cried out, “Sigla Midgard!”
The wind ripped the page from her hands and tore it into tiny pieces of confetti as it flew away into the trees. Her penlight died, and everything around her was black. Her eyes took a few seconds to readjust to the darkness. The surrounding trees came into focus, and the wind settled abruptly. Everything was still.
Chaos Magic (Rune Witch Book 5) Page 3
