Chaos Magic (Rune Witch Book 5)

by Jennifer Willis

  Feeling wobbly, Sally sat on the ground. Her penlight blinked back into service and she surveyed the damage. The runes and sigils were smudged into an indecipherable mess beneath the leaves, bark, and pine needles. Loki let go of the evergreen tree he’d been holding onto, probably to keep from being blown away.

  She tried to run her fingers through the rat’s nest of her hair but gave up when her pentagram ring got snagged in her tangles. She turned off the penlight and shoved it into her pocket.

  “Well?” She was deflated and needed a long drink of water. “Is this what was supposed to happen? A whirlwind farewell to Odin and Frigga?”

  Loki walked carefully toward the remnants of the circle and studied the ground as he moved along its perimeter. Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t seem to be finding it.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” she asked.

  Loki crossed his arms and frowned. “Perhaps not.”

  “Sally Dahl, failure at chaos.” She kicked the dirt with the heels of her sneakers and looked up. It was a rare clear autumn night, and she breathed in the stars to steady herself.

  “The failure is not yours.” Loki sat in a cross-legged position where the outside edge of the circle had been. “It may have been a fool’s errand to have tried.”

  Sally pulled her knees to her chest and tried to ignore the painful tingling in her fingers.

  “Now will you tell me what this was all about? You said I’d understand by the end. But I have to say I still don’t get it.”

  Loki looked at the trees. “If we had gotten the results I had hoped for, you would not have to ask.”

  Sally nearly laughed. “Enough with the magickal mystery already! Just tell me what was supposed to happen. Let me figure out where I went wrong, so we can try it again.”

  “You did everything right, Sally.” Loki’s smile was sad as he picked up a small stick, traced a sigil Sally hadn’t seen before in the dirt, and then obliterated it with a brush of his fingers before she could memorize it. “The working was correct.”

  “So why so glum?”

  He looked hard at Sally, and she felt herself being weighed and measured. Blue and yellow sparks started popping from her fingertips. She leapt to her feet.

  “What do I do?” She shook out her fingers and danced around in pain and confusion. “I’m afraid I’m going to blow something up.”

  Sally felt a surge of warmth over her right hip. Her jacket was on fire. Her penlight must have shorted. She tore off her jacket and threw it on the ground, then stomped out the flames before anything else could catch.

  “Do you see?” She peeled her scorched jacket off the ground and peered at Loki through a palm-sized hole where the pocket used to be. “I can’t live like this!”

  “Have you tried discharging the excess into a natural source?”

  Sally dropped the jacket and shook her hands vigorously at her sides. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  Loki gestured toward the ground. “Sit.”

  Sparks were literally dripping from Sally’s fingertips. She wasn’t sure that sitting on dry kindling was a good idea. “I’ll set the forest on fire.”

  “No, you won’t. Sit. Please.”

  Sally lowered herself to the ground and sat facing Loki. She clutched her hands against her chest, trying to keep the sparks away from the bark and dead leaves littering the ground.

  “Press your palms against the earth.” When Sally didn’t comply, he added, “It’s all right, Sally. This will help.”

  She took a deep breath, unclenched her hands, and rested her open palms lightly on the ground. When nothing combusted, she relaxed her shoulders and pressed her hands firmly against the dirt. She felt the chaos static drain out of her body and into the ground. She almost laughed as the pain subsided and the cool, familiar tingling of Gaia thrummed against her skin.

  “Better?”

  “Much.” Sally closed her eyes and enjoyed her connection to the Earth. It had been too long. She’d avoided reaching out to the energy of the land since her wilderness experience with her duplicitous guide. The healing of Gaia had probably saved her life, and Sally didn’t want to return the favor by tainting the living land with her unstable chaos.

  Sally brushed the dirt off her palms. “How come you didn’t share that little trick with me before?”

  Loki looked almost disappointed. “I hoped you would figure it out for yourself.”

  Sally swallowed hard. He never came out and told her she did something wrong. He never rebuked or chastised her. Instead, he kept his voice calm and his face neutral as he delivered some simple pronouncement that sounded innocuous but stung Sally as if he’d slapped her.

  She’d let him down. She was still pissed at him for what happened with the volcanoes, and with the Vanir in Ireland, but that didn’t mean she didn’t care what he thought of her. She dropped her hands in her lap and looked at her shoes. Dirt was packed into the ridges of the soles. “Is this something that works for you, too?”

  “There was a time when it did.”

  Sally felt doubly stupid. Of course this grounding didn’t work for him. If it did, he’d use it all the time so he wasn’t melting television sets and GPS units.

  “So your magick has changed, over time,” she said.

  Loki nodded.

  “I think that’s something I want to know more about.”

  His smile looked less mysterious and a lot more irritated. “We will come to that topic eventually.” He started to get up.

  “So how come I never had this problem before? Is it because I’m working with you? I was working magick before, but I wasn’t sparking everywhere.”

  Loki slid his hands into the pockets of his worn leather jacket. “We have established that your magick before had a consistent tendency to go awry.”

  “Well, yeah.” Sally slid into her jacket and picked at the burn marks. It still had one functional pocket. Now that her magick was cooling down, she wished she’d brought a hat or a scarf. “So you’re saying that was effectively the same thing.”

  “That is not what I am saying.”

  Sally stood up and surveyed what remained of the circle. If she hadn’t worked the magick herself, she wouldn’t have known anything out of the ordinary had transpired here.

  “So everything went more or less kablooey before because I was carrying chaos and didn’t know it. And now I’m the queen of static shock because I’m working with chaos consciously?” This time she did stamp her foot, half-heartedly. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Loki’s smile grew wry. Mischievous. “You expect chaos to conform to the strictures of human logic?”

  He was teasing her, trying to get her to stumble into the answers to her own questions like an ancient master challenging his slow-witted student with magickal koans. Then she realized that was precisely who he was and what he was doing.

  Sally blew her frustration out of her body in a long huff. “I thought it was supposed to get better, not worse.”

  “You are familiar with the adage, ‘The only way out is through’?”

  Sally shot him a disgusted look. “My dad always says that whenever I have exams.”

  Loki laughed.

  “So, grounding, huh?” she asked.

  “Earth or stone or wood.” He turned toward the path they’d taken into the woods. “Water is somewhat trickier, but it can be better than nothing. Sometimes.”

  Sally started to follow, and then stopped. “Wait. You still haven’t told me what you were trying to get me to do for you here.”

  The implication of her words settled over her, and she shook it off. That would be part of the eventual someday conversation she would have with Loki.

  “What was supposed to happen?” she asked.

  Loki turned to face her. “You’re a clever witch, Sally, smarter than you give yourself credit for.”

  Sally made a face and balled her fists, one inside her remaining pocket and the other at her side. Everything
had to be a test with him. Sometimes she could get him to slide sideways into answering an actual question, if she managed to steer the conversation onto some tangential topic, but she was beginning to think he was solidly in control in those instances, too.

  If I’m worth the magick that flows through me, she told herself, I should be able to figure this out.

  She looked back over the ritual space. All of the runes and sigils had been erased by the wind. The pages of Loki’s spell were gone, so she couldn’t do a forensic analysis. She loosened her hands and held them out in front of her like a divining rod.

  It didn’t matter that she hadn’t understood the different languages used in the spell. She’d spoken the words and put her power behind them. She listened to the swirling story of the spell that lingered in the ground, and to the song of the magick that echoed in her blood.

  A cloak of mist and ice enveloped her as ghostly images of restless shades played across the inside of her eyelids. She felt the illusion of her body desiccating while she drew breath, her chest heaving as she sensed the thinning boundary between the realms. This was wholly unlike anything she’d so much as thought about before. Even her spell for Freyr hadn’t felt this spooky or cold.

  Her eyes snapped open and before the vision had fully faded she turned on Loki with a rage fueled by indignation and fear.

  “You used me!” She balled her left hand into a fist and struck the god of chaos in the face.

  3

  Thor lay in the dark and stared up at the low ceiling. He studied the exposed beam that formed the center spine of the master bedroom and continued into the hallway. The ceiling pitched sharply on either side of the beam, sloping down to the short walls. It was like sleeping in a permanent tent.

  Bonnie’s place was a cozy craftsman-style home—cozy compared to the open floor-plan and lofty ceilings of the Lodge. And now it was Thor’s home, where his new wife and adopted son slept easily. And where Thor was not sleeping at all.

  He rested on his left side until his hip socket started to ache. He switched to his other side and watched Bonnie breathing in, her eyes covered by a sleep mask and her ears obscured by some headphones-inside-a-headband gadget that played computer-generated ambient sounds all night. It was supposed to block out Thor’s snoring. He watched his wife dream and wondered if a gizmo like that could help him get some rest.

  He turned again onto his back, the bed frame shuddering with every movement. Time progressed at a glacial pace with insomnia, but his busy brain refused to settle. It was Winter Nights, a time for honoring the dead. A time for appeasing restless spirits.

  Stepping into a Lodge not occupied by Odin and Frigga had stung worse than a late-season wasp. Heimdall made a decent showing as the celebratory host, and Maggie . . . Well, Thor wasn’t sure what Maggie hoped to accomplish with that farce of a feast.

  Except he did know. On top of everything else, she wanted to take Frigga’s place in all things, and she’d shouldered her way in without discussion or consideration for anyone else.

  Thor glanced again at Bonnie, sleeping peacefully on her back with her lips parted. Something in his chest tugged a little when he considered how this woman had chosen to bind her life to his. It wouldn’t be an easy existence, and their life together was already far from conventional. It was the first time he had taken a wife. He’d gotten close once before, but that had been among his own kin and kind. Bonnie was an Einherjar warrior, but she was mortal. And Maggie was a reluctant, accidental, and sometimes even resentful goddess. Everything about the situation rubbed him the wrong way.

  Thor sat up and swung his legs out of bed, his feet hitting the floor with a thud. Bonnie murmured something in her sleep and turned away as he heaved himself to his feet, grabbed his phone from the nightstand, and walked out into the hallway.

  Heimdall was the obvious choice to replace Odin. He was steadfast and reasonable and he rarely charged into a crisis without a plan—the polar opposite of Thor. Thor wasn’t too proud to admit that he bristled at being always in his brother’s shadow. The chilly rift between their households underscored Heimdall’s advantage; Heimdall was in possession of the family’s traditional home in the Pierce Forest—where the Yggdrasil grew tall and strong and where Maggie had established the new grove of apples and sited her well—while Thor had essentially banished himself to Portland.

  Thor closed the bedroom door as he flexed and stretched his fingers. At least he’d gotten to punch Loki. He’d held back, not wanting to do permanent damage. But it still felt good—until he saw the stricken look on Sally’s face, and until Bonnie laid into him on the ride home. As usual, his first impulse was force and violence. But now he was feeling the twinge of something different. Might it be guilt?

  He grumbled quietly as he strode down the hall toward his son’s bedroom. In the wake of losing Odin and Frigga, he’d distanced himself from the surviving members of the Lodge. Everyone had. Maggie tried to gather everyone back in, but she might as well have been endeavoring to herd a bellicose collection of Freya’s skogkatts.

  He cracked open the door to his son’s room. Little Magnus was sleeping as peacefully as his mother, without all the accoutrements. They didn’t know how old Magnus might be, nor what to expect in the coming years. There was no handbook available on how to raise an adopted child who was half volcano spirit and half sasquatch.

  Thor watched the rise and fall of Magnus’s chest and felt that tug in his chest again. Lodge or no Lodge, this was his family—and so was Heimdall and Saga and Freya and even Sally and Maggie. Nothing could change that.

  But none of the Valkyries had had the dream of Odin and Frigga and no one, not even the blasted Norns, seemed to know what that meant or what to do about it. If his parents weren’t settled in Valhalla, might they all be in danger? Or was this some collective existential crisis the Lodge would simply have to muddle through together?

  Thor closed the door and pulled up his phone’s contacts. He paused over his brother’s listing, then blew out a quiet sigh and tapped the screen.

  “Heimdall,” Thor whispered in the dark hallway. “We need to talk.”

  Loki sat on the short flight of steps leading from the gravel walkway to the front door of his tiny abode. It was a few hours yet before dawn, and he kept his face turned skyward—partly to watch the stars sliding past overhead, and partly to keep his bloodied nose from swelling up too much more.

  Two beatdowns in a single night. That was probably a new record, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He’d been lucky to escape Thor’s blow without permanent disfigurement, but Sally might have broken his nose. He sincerely hoped “punch Loki in the face” wouldn’t become a new Winter Nights tradition.

  As he shivered from the ice on the back of his neck and the dull, throbbing pain in his face, he couldn’t bring himself to blame her. She had every right to be frustrated and angry, and not just this evening. He’d tricked her, and rather inelegantly. Just when he’d cracked open the door to earning back her trust, he’d done something stupid like using her power to further his own ends.

  He could rationalize the need for expediency. He could factor in the potential danger to Frigga and Odin, and to the rest of them, if immediate action weren’t taken. He could argue that he’d prioritized Sally’s best interests by having her work a spell aimed at bringing the Lord and Lady of the Lodge back to the living world of Midgard, so that Sally would no longer be solely under Loki’s tutelage.

  But the truth was he’d done it for himself. He wanted his friends back. He wanted to ease his own guilt over their loss. He wanted to ease the Rune Witch’s burden and take the pressure off himself. He wanted to heal the ache of grief in the Lodge, and to improve his stock with those under its roof.

  Was it unconscionable that he felt the loss of Odin so keenly that he would do almost anything to secure his return? Loki had a hard time justifying it to himself, though that didn’t stop him from acting. Odin had been Loki’s oldest and possibly only frie
nd. Without Odin’s presence in this world of mortals, Loki was acutely aware of his own existence unraveling, and not just in the metaphorical sense. Bringing back Odin meant safeguarding the fragile balance of energies that were already teetering out of equilibrium.

  He would explain it all to Sally. Eventually. When she matured in her magick and as a person, and when she decided to start speaking to him again. In the meantime, the problem of the fraying fabric of magick remained. There was little he could do to stop it without her full participation, and without her embracing the role she must play in the new order of things.

  He watched the stars and nursed his swollen face. The ice melted down the back of his shirt, and he wiped a wet hand across his jeans. He wasn’t sure the ice was doing anything constructive anyway. He would go inside and prepare an herbal remedy, and that would get the job done, over time.

  But not just yet. He wanted to sit and watch the skies a few minutes longer.

  4

  It wasn’t quite 9 a.m. when Sally arrived on Bonnie’s doorstep in Southeast Portland. She had barely slept, and she smelled like wind-whipped leaves and dirt. At least she’d changed into fresh clothes.

  She knocked on the front door with her right hand and winced at the purplish bruises on her left. Loki deserved another punch in the face, and she was glad she’d used her non-dominant hand. She still had lectures to attend and notes to take, even though she often wondered if there was any point to staying in school.

  She knocked again. She had no idea if anyone would be home. Thor and baby Magnus had moved in with Bonnie right after the wedding but there had been talk of the new family relocating to the Lodge where Heimdall and Maggie presided over their kin’s affairs. But Sally guessed that was part of the problem the night before.

  From what she’d seen, Odin had relied more heavily on Heimdall but he hadn’t left clear instructions regarding who should succeed him. Heimdall was the natural choice, but Thor was a force to be reckoned with. He could stir others to a cause like no one Sally had ever seen, when he put his mind to it. Trouble was, he was easily distracted and quick to anger. He often behaved more like a charging bull who needed to be pointed in the right direction.