Sally ran her fingers lightly over the scar Managarm’s saw had left on the Old Tree’s body. The knot he’d sliced off to craft his own bastardized set of runes left a nearly perfect circle on the trunk’s surface—right next to carved declarations by young lovers “S+M” and “ACK & PAD.” It had been four-and-a-half years since the wayward god attempted his coup, but it felt like so much longer. Sally smiled at the tremble of magick in the scarred wood beneath her fingertips. Neither Managarm nor storm winds had been able to steal the magick of the Old Tree. Not completely.
She spread her fingers wide and pressed her palms against the contours of the old Tree. Its bark was brittle and its husk was moldered and rotted in the incessant rain of the Pacific Northwest. She leaned close to rest her cheek against the damp trunk and breathed in scents of the forest in decay. Images of Odin and Frigga filled her mind, and she smiled.
“You and I are more alike than you know,” she whispered to the remains of the old Tree. “No one knows what to do with either one of us.”
She rested like that for a time, eyes closed and mind wandering. She might have even fallen asleep, standing in the rain and leaning against the giant stump. But there was no one around to disturb her. The mostly forgotten park off of Highway 26 was deserted at this time of night, and especially in the inclement weather. It was usually deserted in the middle of a sunny day, too.
Sally took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She whispered to Odin and Frigga, something between a prayer and plea, just in case they were not truly out of reach. In rare quiet moments, Sally liked to imagine that they could see her and maybe even guide her. She no longer feared their judgment and sorely wished she weren’t so far beyond their advice.
She pushed herself away from the Tree and paused to brush the dust of crumbling bark from her cheek. She gave the trunk an affectionate pat before she stepped away.
She was halfway down the path to the parking area when she turned back to look at the Tree. She wasn’t ready to leave. She never was. Something about this old, desiccated vessel of magick and creation kept tugging at her, a bit more every day since Frigga followed her husband to the Halls of Valhalla.
Sally turned her face skyward and closed her eyes against the rain. It was coming down harder now and her clothes and hair were already soaked. Cool drops tickled the back of her neck as they ran down from her scalp, across her collar bones, and down her spine. She spread her arms wide.
“I am the Rune Witch!” Sally called into the black sky. Even without the cloudy gloom, the empty darkness of the new moon was her favorite time now. She didn’t have to pretend to be something she wasn’t. She didn’t struggle to make sense of everything that had happened and would happen. There were no worries over her destiny or her role among the Norse gods who had transitioned from idols to friends and then to uneasy allies.
She turned back to the trunk standing sentinel in the rain. The old Tree seemed to know something she didn’t. Something about eternity and impermanence, and about the interplay of entropy and order. She kept hoping to absorb the old Tree’s lessons by osmosis, and these visits did give her powerful dreams when she lay her head down in the wee hours before dawn. But she couldn’t put her finger on the wisdom she was sure the old Tree was trying to impart.
“Do you miss me when I’m not here?” Sally whispered. She heard nothing but the patter of rain in reply.
A suggestion of thunder rumbled in the distance, interrupting Sally’s reverie. Storms weren’t common in the Pacific Northwest—not the kind with proper thunder and lightning, even with Thor the Thunderer in residence nearby. She cocked her head and listened for the cranky sky to repeat its protestation. After nearly a full minute of silence, she shrugged and sent a new trickle of raindrops coursing beneath the collar of her sweatshirt.
Sally crouched down and rested her hands on her knees. She kept her eyes trained on the shadowy outline of the Old Yggdrasil.
“Freya wouldn’t like that I’m here alone at night,” she confessed. “And Frigga . . .”
A shiver ran down Sally’s spine. Frigga had made her choice. She was no longer part of this world, and she’d left Sally to fend for herself.
But Sally didn’t belong to Frigga. The uneven line of Rune Witches in Sally’s ancestry had faithfully served as human helpmates to the Norse Goddess of the Hearth and her kin. And Sally had trained beside Frigga’s fire just as earnestly as the others must have done. Mostly earnestly. At the very least, Sally imagined her own sincerity had been pure. But she was headstrong. She was always trying something new or different on her own, even when she’d been warned specifically against doing so. Her magick was always going wrong, until she embraced the chaos within her. Now her magick only mostly went wrong.
Sally grinned at the Old Tree and laughed. “You’d think I would have figured it out sooner.”
There was another rumble of thunder in the distance. Not the great sky-rending crash one might hear in other parts of the world. Thunder here sounded more like someone rolling a dented, metal trashcan down an alley. The effect wasn’t nearly as dramatic.
Sally rubbed her wet hands together and stood. She dipped her chin in salute to the Old Tree and reached for the car keys in her jeans pocket. The clunker—Bragi’s beat-up Subaru—had been a guilt-gift from Heimdall after he’d let her stand alone against Hel in the Norse underworld.
“I’ll see you at the next new moon then?”
The Old Tree remained silent. Sally smiled anyway. She turned and headed for her car. She stopped just before she unlocked the driver’s door. There was a prick of electricity at the nape of her neck. The rain—and her preoccupation with her own thoughts—nearly masked his presence, but she would recognize Loki’s flavor of chaos anywhere.
Sally turned toward the short, shallow bridge leading to the highway. There, standing in silhouette on the pebbly bank by the creek, stood Loki. God of Chaos. Father of Wargs. Keeper of the Realms. She’d learned that last title only in Hel’s hall, and a year and a half later she was still coming to grips with his role in the fluctuating stability of the world and what it meant for her own future.
She didn’t wonder about how he’d tracked her, or how he’d arrived here without a vehicle of his own. He was fading, but he had plenty of tricks left. She wanted to shout at him to stop following her. She wanted to curse him for her own power and uncertainty. She wanted to stomp across the wet parking lot to throw her arms around him in a bear hug, or to punch him in the nose. Maybe both.
But the Tree wasn’t the only old thing that still had secrets to reveal. Sally sighed and got into her car. She only briefly glanced at Loki as she drove past him on her way back onto Highway 26, headed to Portland.
Loki’s shoulders slumped as he watched her drive by. Of course she would have known he was here, even though he’d remained by the creek, far from her car and from the old Yggdrasil. Magick senses magick. Chaos magick in particular.
This wasn’t the first time he’d followed Sally. He preferred to think of it as such, just following her. Not spying on her. He was interested in her well-being and curious about her activities. He never interfered, nor did he share his findings with anyone else. But since she’d been skipping out on her lessons with him, he didn’t have too many other options for keeping tabs on his young pupil.
This was the first time, though, that he’d followed her to the old World Tree, and he got the distinct impression this wasn’t her first pilgrimage. He hoped her visit signaled her acceptance of her new role in the pantheon and in the world at large. She’d had the whole thing thrust onto her rather inelegantly. No one had offered her a choice. But no one had offered Loki a choice, either. He didn’t think so. He couldn’t really remember anymore.
He would take it all away from her if he had the power to do so. He’d done his best to prepare her for the mantle that would too soon settle onto her unsuspecting shoulders. And there was so much more he needed to share with her, and warn her about, but her stubbornness
had taken her to a place beyond listening or learning. And he was fast running out of time.
He watched her car cross the modest bridge and turn left onto the highway heading east toward the city, her red taillights gradually fading into the rainy darkness. He looked into the sky and wished he could see the stars. The old constellations were some of the only anchors he had in this world in these late days, but even the stars weren’t unchangeable.
There was nothing that could have readied him to be this particular wielder of chaos magick, and nothing to guide him as he imparted his wisdom to his pupil. He thought it was right that she would protest and rebel. She had every reason to be angry and distant. Loki liked to think that he had been the same way.
The danger now was both ignorance and hubris—for all of the members of the Lodge, really, but especially for himself and for Sally. If he couldn’t find a way to reach her in these waning days, the entire world would pay the price.
Probably. He couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
It was dark in the tunnel. That was the only thing the boy could be sure of. He didn’t dare risk making his own light.
He stumbled, feeling his way forward in the blackness. Every footstep was too loud. Every breath would surely give him away. He couldn’t hear the angry voices or stomping boots of the bad men who must be pursuing him, but he didn’t let himself believe he’d made a clean getaway.
If he did manage to break out of the darkness and into freedom, what would happen to his parents left behind?
Tears streamed down his cheeks. He couldn’t make them stop, so he pretended they weren’t there. But he kept wiping his runny nose on his dirty, ragged sleeve until the cloth was crusting over with snot.
His feet slid inside his too-big shoes, worn and dirty and molded to fit someone else’s feet. He didn’t cry out when his toe sent a glass bottle skittering across the broken brick and asphalt. When his fingers were bitten by a sharp edge along the wall, he stuffed his fingers into his mouth and sucked at the blood that welled up.
“Jass!” the memory of his mother’s voice hissed in his ear. “Jass, Maksim!”
Maksim kept moving.
He came to another crossroads in the darkness. Make a turn or go straight? He didn’t know the way or even where he was trying to go. He navigated based on flickers of far-away light or scary sounds that warned him away. He had never been good at puzzles, no matter how many times his father had enticed him to play, and this passage was a long and confusing maze. He lost track of how many turns he had already made and which direction he was heading. What if he scrabbled all this way only to find himself back where he started, in the den of the bad men who beat his father and made his mother cry?
“Jass, Maksim!”
He followed the pull of magick he felt in his hands and his chest. The bad men wanted his magick for themselves because they had none. He kept his back to the tunnel wall. Moisture seeped through his thin shirt and made him shiver. It was a fraying jersey with logos and numbers on it. The men had laughed when they tossed it to him, joking that he could be like the strong and tall basketball players they watched on their screens. Now the shirt was filthy and wet.
When he stepped away from the tunnel wall, he felt like he was swimming in an empty void. That made him flail his arms and cry harder even as he struggled to keep quiet. He resisted the urge to make a spark to see ahead; the bad men would see it and find him. He wiped his face on his dirty sleeve and prayed to every god whose name he could remember that he might find safety soon.
His shoulder banged painfully into something hard at the same moment his worn shoe collided with a heavy obstacle on the floor. Had he found a weapon? Exploring along the wall, his fingers slid along solid ropes of cool metal. A ladder. But to where? Only darkness loomed over his head. The glimmer of magick urged him upward. He gripped the nearest rung and wondered what to do.
“Jass!”
Before his mind caught up to his muscles, he was several feet off the ground and climbing. He felt with his hands above his head on every rung, but he kept finding empty air. He couldn’t see the floor beneath him. If he let go, how far would he fall?
He felt like a space traveler he’d heard about in stories, floating in the void, isolated, alone. The tunnel was cold, too, just like outer space. Water condensed on the rungs, and he had to be careful not to slip.
Maksim kept climbing.
Finally, his reaching fingers brushed a contoured surface above his head. It was round and cold—metal, like the ladder. He pushed against it, but it was heavy and stubborn.
“Avree!” he whispered as he pressed both hands against the metal disc. “Jal avree!”
He gave a grunt as he wedged his shoulder against the ceiling and shoved. Metal grated against concrete as he lifted and pushed the seal away until there was enough room for his body to pass through. He heaved himself from the top of the ladder onto a rough floor and into more darkness. He hoped for a kind voice or a pair of friendly hands, but the sound of his own breathing and nothing else told him he was still alone.
He felt his way around the tight space, patting his hands against coarse wooden planks and being careful to avoid the center of the room. He didn’t want to fall through the hole into the tunnel. His fingers snagged a thick cloth hanging on the wall, and he tugged it down and wrapped it around his shoulders. It was a musty blanket, damp and mildewed. But it was good felted wool, and Maksim had been so cold for so long.
Finally, his fingers found the outline of a door. He ran his hands over it, looking for a handle or knob. He wanted to call out for help, but he didn’t know who or what might be waiting on the other side. He swallowed his fear when he found a dented metal knob. He glanced toward the hole in the floor to listen for the bad men following him. It was quiet.
The door made a terrible creaking sound as he pulled it open, and he blinked hard at the light that stung his eyes. He stepped across the threshold and coughed when his lungs filled with the first fresh air he’d tasted in many weeks. His eyes blurred with tears of confusion and fear in the shock of the sunlight glinting off of glass.
He stepped out into thick weeds. Shielding his eyes, he looked at the houses on either side. Houses bigger than any he’d ever seen, painted bright colors and with clean windows. He was surprised by the thick layer of clouds in the sky. Had he been in the dark so long that a dreary day would seem so bright?
The door slammed shut behind him, and Maksim cried out in surprise. He huddled in the weeds and looked around in a panic, but he breathed more easily when he realized he was still alone, even if he had no idea where he was. He couldn’t remember the details of his family’s anxious travels in the hands of their abductors, only that it had been a long journey. And this place looked nothing like home.
He studied the door he’d come through, a featureless rectangle in the face of what looked like an old shed. Dark green and faded yellow paint peeled away from the wood in strips. The tall, brown grass hadn’t seen maintenance in several seasons, and the shed matched the colors of the block-like house that dominated the lot.
He pulled the mildewed blanket close and marveled at the house. It was as wide as it was tall, with pale flowers on the window curtains. It didn’t look like anyone had been home in a long time.
This was probably good. If the tunnels led him to the shed, maybe the bad men or their friends were living in that house. The memory of his mother’s voice urged him onward and Maksim crept down an asphalt driveway toward the street. Once he was in the road, he balled his hands into fists and concentrated. He had to find help. Again he felt the pull of magick. It was full of hope and promised warmth. He turned left and ran as fast as his feet would carry him. The blanket fluttered behind him like a cape.
All the houses looked the same as he tore through block after block of wood and plaster frames in hues of yellow, blue, and pink. Two shiny cars honked their horns at him as he ran, but no one stopped or came after him. The few faces he saw were clean b
ut cold, and they watched him pass without remark. He kept running.
It started to rain. He tried to read the green street signs as he came to one crossroads after another, but the letters were foreign to him. He searched for something familiar—the orange flowers of the old man’s garden or the huge oak tree that marked the turn to his grandmother’s house. There were many big trees here, some of them even like the towering oaks from home, but he didn’t recognize a single one of them.
If he ran fast enough and far enough, would he find his way back home? What if he was running in the wrong direction?
His heart pounded in his chest and his lungs began to burn. His steps slowed on the wet pavement. Sweat ran from his brow to mingle on his cheeks with the rain and his tears—he couldn’t stop crying—and he wiped a corner of the smelly blanket across his face.
He stopped and turned in a slow circle as he caught his breath. He spotted one house with its front door standing open. All of the others were locked up tight. There. That’s where the magick was. He clutched the blanket, climbed the house’s concrete steps, and paused on the wide, wooden porch. He felt a crackling spark across his skin, but it was a welcoming instead of a warning. Should he knock on the open door? Should he announce himself? He thought about the underground den where the bad men were keeping his people, and he stepped into the house’s entryway.
Voices came from the back of the house, and Maksim understood most of what they were saying. His spoken English was good; even the bad men said so. The voices sounded happy, and there was a power here that felt familiar and warm. He hiccuped in surprise when the voices broke into laughter. He hurried into the house and down the hallway.
He turned a corner and entered a kitchen of fancy appliances and cabinets of wood and glass. A massive window overlooked a neat garden and rear yard with three good climbing trees and wooden swings swaying in the breeze.
Chaos Magic (Rune Witch Book 5) Page 24
