Thief Eyes

by Janni Lee Simner

  The fog slowly cleared. The sun was always so low here—I couldn’t tell what time it was. My knee had stopped bleeding, and the sea had washed the blood away. Instead of the jagged gash that had been there, I saw only an angry red scab.

  As if I’d been running for quite some time.

  Chapter 3

  By the time I reached the guesthouse, the fog had cleared and my knee ached again. My lips were numb, and so were the tips of my fingers and toes. I threw the door open and stumbled into the entryway, soaking in the wonderful indoor warmth.

  It took me a moment to realize that Dad stood there, watching me. He wore jeans and yesterday’s shirt, and his hair stuck out in even more directions than usual. He trembled as he grabbed me into a hug. “Haley, where were you?” I drew back and looked at him. “Just out for a run. I left a note.”

  Dad shook his head. “That was six hours ago.”

  What? “No, I only ran a few miles, I—”

  Dad turned his watch to me—10:30, it read. “I’ve been out looking for you.” His voice was tight, like a string about to snap. “I was getting ready to call the police.”

  My wet clothes felt clammy and cold. “That’s impossible.” No way had I been running for six hours. I thought of the sudden fog; that should have been impossible, too. Was I going insane? If Dad couldn’t handle a few nightmares, what would he do if I lost it completely?

  I stretched my cooling calves, not looking at him. “Guess I’m still learning my way around.” I tried to keep my voice light—a nothing-to-worry-about-here voice. “Took a few wrong turns. Sorry.”

  Dad reached out and touched my damp hair. It had fallen out of its elastic and hung limp about my face. He glanced at my torn pants. “Haley, is there something I should know?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I forced a laugh. “Some boy’s dog ran into me, tripped me up pretty good.” I pulled off my sodden shoes and set them on the shoe rack by the door.

  “You ran.” Dad’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  “I’m a runner, of course I—” The words stuck in my throat as I realized what he meant. “No, not like that!” I hadn’t run away, not like Mom. I rubbed at my damp arms. A rock inside one of my soaked socks dug into my toe. “I told you, I got lost!”

  “I know what you told me.” Dad’s face set into firmer lines. “But I’m telling you something, too, Haley. I won’t leave Iceland without you. Do you understand that?”

  My fingertips and lips were still cold. I wanted to get out of there, into a warm shower. “I said I was sorry.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “I lost track of the time, I—” I couldn’t meet Dad’s steady gaze. How could he even think I’d run away? “I understand,” I muttered.

  “Good,” Dad said. I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. “Go get changed, then, or we’ll be late for lunch.”

  I bolted for my room, leaving wet footprints on the wooden floor. I had a sudden fierce thought: How come you left without Mom? I grabbed shampoo and a towel and headed for the shower. I knew well enough why Dad had left Iceland last summer—to look after me. But I could have stayed with Grandma in Yuma a few weeks longer, or else with Jared’s family back in Tucson when school started. Why had Dad let this go?

  I peeled off my wet clothes—it felt good to get out of them—and turned on the shower. Warm water burned against my skin, chasing the last of my shivers away. The water held a faint rotten-egg sulfur smell. I thought of the woman on the seawall, of the hot ash scent before I fell into the bay. I turned the water up. Steam rose around me, and the numbness left my fingers and toes. I knew well enough that the smell came from the geothermal vents that heated the whole city. Hot water by volcano, Dad had said.

  Fire leaping up from beneath the earth—I scrubbed fiercely at my scraped knee, only stopping when the scab began to bleed. I didn’t want to think about my dreams, any more than I wanted to think about the long-haired woman and the way her hand had gone right through mine. I glanced down at my own hands. The red circle from the coin was gone—again. I saw only half-moon scabs that were already healing. The pale white scars beneath them seemed to have settled in for good this past year, though.

  Steam fogged the shower door. What if I really was going insane?

  Could Mom have gone crazy, too? Crazy enough to dream of fire and see ghosts and fall into the sea? Was that what Dad didn’t want to tell me?

  I drew a shuddering breath and coughed on sulfur-scented steam. This wasn’t just about some nightmares or a few failed tests. Whatever was going on, I should talk to Dad. If he couldn’t cope, maybe he’d find someone who could. Maybe this was a matter for professionals.

  It’d be easier to talk to Mom. I want to talk to Mom. I turned off the water and watched the steam disappear. Tomorrow, I promised myself. I’d get some sleep, make sure I didn’t just have the worst case of jet lag ever, and then I’d talk to Dad.

  I wrapped myself in the towel, dug some Band-Aids out of the first-aid kit Dad had stuck in the medicine cabinet, and ducked into my room. As I pulled on jeans and a Desert Museum T-shirt, I heard Dad start the shower.

  I still had the boy’s bloody handkerchief. Meeting him and Flosi, at least, had been real. I shoved the handkerchief into my jeans pocket, a reminder that I wasn’t crazy about everything. I ran a brush through my wet hair and pulled it up into a new elastic. Then I jammed a water bottle and the phrase book into my backpack, grabbed my jacket, and headed into the kitchen. I felt a little better after the shower. I filled a bowl with cornflakes and poured on the milk.

  Or what I thought was milk—I sputtered and only barely managed to swallow. When we’d gone shopping on the way home last night, my phrase book had insisted mjolk was milk—but this tasted like yogurt mixed with sour cream. I dumped in a bunch of the Noa Kropp malt balls I’d also bought. They didn’t taste like malt balls, either—more like chocolate-covered Rice Krispies—but at least they helped take the edge off. I stashed the rest of the bag in my backpack, in case lunch was no better than breakfast.

  Dad joined me in the kitchen as I spooned up the last few bits of chocolate. Mom wouldn’t have approved of mixing candy with breakfast. Dad didn’t even notice. He was dressed up, for Dad, in khakis and a button-down shirt, his hair combed into submission. I tossed the bowl into the sink and we headed out.

  The sun was bright, the sky so blue I wondered if I hadn’t imagined the fog after all. Dad focused on the road and on shifting gears in our small rental car, but he kept stealing glances at me, like he wanted to ask what had really happened during those six hours. I stared out the window, where a few puffy white clouds clung to a black volcanic hillside. No, not clouds—steam, rising up from within the earth, like a mini-volcano. At the base of the hill a green field was streaked with bright yellow dandelions. Didn’t they know better than to grow in a place like that, where molten fire could wipe them out at any time? We drove past more black hills and more stretches of startling green, dotted with purple and yellow wild-flowers. In a field, a pair of shaggy-maned Icelandic horses scratched each other’s backs with their blocky teeth as we drove past.

  Silence stretched between Dad and me. The green gave way to a rocky gray wilderness, the rocks to a grassy hillside with a shining blue lake down below. Beyond the lake I saw the gray walls of the rift valley, row upon row of them. Dad turned, turned again, and pulled into a parking lot beneath the cliff we’d stood on yesterday, in front of a red-and-white building a road sign had labeled the Hotel Valholl.

  Cold wind hit me as I got out of the car, in spite of the clear sky. “It really didn’t feel like six hours,” I told Dad.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair—so much for his combing it—and I knew he didn’t believe me. I sighed, too, and followed him inside, past an entryway hung with—yuck!—animal skins, and into a small dining room. A gray-haired couple in matching puffin sweatshirts sat at one table, a boy scribbling in a notebook at another. The boy closed the notebook an
d looked up. I blinked hard. It was Flosi’s owner.

  His hat was still jammed over his ears, but he’d hung his leather jacket over his chair, revealing a faded Star Wars T-shirt. His mouth quirked into a smile. “You’re Haley, then?” As I wondered how he knew, Dad crossed the room to shake his hand. “You’ve grown, Ari.”

  “That is the usual way of things.” His smile stiffened as he shook Dad’s hand. He quickly turned to me as I walked up beside Dad. “So you see, I have a name as well.”

  My face grew hot. I realized I’d asked his dog’s name but not his.

  “Mom went to get some things from the car,” Ari continued, still not looking at Dad. “She’ll be right back.”

  “Wait—you’re Katrin’s son?”

  “So they tell me,” he said dryly. He had more of an accent than his mother did.

  Dad took the seat across from Ari. I sat down next to Dad and draped my jacket over the back of my chair. “It’s nice that you could join us,” Dad said.

  “Yeah, well, I never turn down food. I invited myself, actually.” Ari stared at me through those green eyes, like he was trying to figure something out. “Flosi forgives you, by the way. The women do like to throw themselves at him. It is a problem.”

  My face flushed hotter. Was he flirting with me? How did you say “no, sorry, I have a boyfriend” in Icelandic? Or in English, for that matter? It wasn’t like it had ever come up before.

  Dad cleared his throat, and I realized I’d been staring back at Ari. I looked quickly down. “We met on my run,” I said.

  “Would that be before you got lost or afterward?” Dad’s voice grew quiet.

  “Before,” I said.

  “She tried to kill my dog,” Ari agreed cheerfully.

  “Well, Flosi does have a way of getting underfoot.” Dad laughed, but there was an uneasy edge to it. “So that’s how you tore your pants?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And is it also how your clothes got wet?”

  “Well, no, but—” I fell silent as Katrin slid into the chair beside Ari and dumped a pile of geology books onto the table.

  “Hello, Katrin,” Dad said.

  Katrin didn’t answer him. She looked right at me. There were tired circles around her eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d take the next plane back to the States?”

  Right. Katrin really did want to get rid of me, though I had no idea why. I shook my head firmly. “Not unless you plan to put my mom and dad both on that plane home.”

  Dad flinched, but Ari looked up with interest. Of course—his mom probably knew what had happened, and she’d probably told him. At least he didn’t look like he felt sorry for me, the way some of my friends at school had.

  “Very well. If you insist on staying, there are some things you need to know.” Katrin’s expression turned businesslike. She handed me a small yellow spiral notebook from the pile, like one of Dad’s waterproof field notebooks. “For you, Haley. Had you grown up here, you’d have had a copy years ago, but there’s no helping that now.”

  I flipped through the pages. They were filled with a mix of cramped writing and strange symbols—squiggles and circles and lines. The waterproof paper felt slippery against my fingers.

  “Read it through,” Katrin said. “Let me know if you have any questions. Your mother—”

  I pressed the notebook shut. “What do you know about my mother?”

  Katrin drew a long breath. “There is no easy way to say this. Your mother got caught by a sorcerer’s spell.”

  I stared at her, not sure I’d heard right. Dad set his hands down on the table. “Not this again,” he said in his quiet angry voice.

  Katrin’s fierce gray eyes reminded me of the woman on the seawall. “Yes, this again, Gabe, and perhaps now you’ll listen.”

  I was listening. I shoved the notebook into my pack. Magic seemed as good an explanation for this morning as anything else. “There was this woman, I saw her on my run—” I stopped, realizing how stupid I sounded. If I mentioned my missing six hours, I’d sound stupider still.

  “You didn’t mention any woman before,” Dad said.

  “With long hair,” Katrin said. Her face pinched into the same worried look as yesterday. “In a red cloak.”

  “How—who is she?”

  “Who is who?” Dad demanded. Ari looked back and forth between us, opened his mouth as if to say something, and closed it again. A waiter walked up, left menus at the edge of the table, and quickly departed. Ari grabbed one and disappeared behind it.

  Katrin laced her hands together. “Hallgerdur Hoskuldsdottir—Hallgerd, you’d say in English. Hallgerd was—some say she was a spoiled child who didn’t get her way. Others say she was just a woman seeking a way out of an unwanted marriage. A thousand years ago, Hallgerd’s father betrothed her to a man she didn’t care for. Everyone knows this story—it’s in our sagas. Only the sagas don’t tell that Hallgerd was a sorcerer, and that she cast a spell to get out of her first marriage. She meant to find someone—some descendant of hers—to change places with. In doing so she hoped to escape to another time.”

  “And leave someone else stuck with the guy instead?” I asked. What does this have to do with me? Why am I seeing this woman?

  “Hallgerd called on power deep within the earth for her spell,” Katrin said. “That power echoes on to the present day, in the patterns of the plates that shift beneath our feet and the fires that stir the earth.”

  Dad rolled his eyes. “Or the plates could be shifting because Iceland is located both atop a hot spot and on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, making it one of the most geologically active places on the entire planet.”

  “The spell failed,” Katrin said, as if she hadn’t heard, “so Hallgerd sent her—her foster father, that’s the best translation, though it’s not quite right—to kill her husband Thorvald instead, after Thorvald slapped her during a fight. Her foster father killed her second husband, too, though it’s less clear Hallgerd wanted that. As for Hallgerd’s third husband—he died when she refused him her hair to make a new string for his bow.”

  Gunnar died, of course. I remembered the tour guide saying that. How much did you have to hate someone to refuse him a few strands of your hair?

  “She was quite the charmer,” Ari said from behind his menu.

  Katrin glanced at Ari, then back at me. “But all of that was later,” she said. “First Hallgerd cast the spell on her descendants—on her daughter and her daughter’s daughters, all the way down the line. Not many of her descendants remain, but I’m one, and your mother was another, only I didn’t know that when she came here.”

  “Wait—we’re related?” And Dad just happened to wind up working with Mom’s long-lost cousin?

  Ari snorted. “No more related than most Icelanders,” he said. “This is not a large island, Haley. I’m more closely related to the prime minister than to you.”

  “The common ancestor was some twenty generations back,” Katrin said. “You’re probably more closely related to your president, too. And we probably have other common ancestors closer than Hallgerd—but that is not the point. The point is that Hallgerd searched for one of us to possess. For thirty generations, we all knew to turn away from her spell. Until your mother—” A pained look crossed Katrin’s face. “She probably didn’t even understand what Hallgerd offered her.”

  Dad shoved his menu aside. “We don’t have to listen to this.”

  I ignored him. “What happened to Mom?”

  Katrin swallowed and looked down at her laced fingers. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know Amanda was one of Hallgerd’s daughters—that she was part of the line that had left for North America—until it was too late. I would have warned her, but—she ran, and so the spell consumed her.”

  “Consumed?” My throat tightened around the word.

  Dad grabbed my hand. “I won’t have you upsetting Haley with this nonsense.”

  Katrin glared at him. “Better for her to be upset and aliv
e. What you need to know, Haley, is that you’re one of Hallgerd’s daughters, too. And while the spell should have ended with your mother, it hasn’t. I don’t understand why, but the power Hallgerd called upon is with us still. You felt the earthquake yesterday. I think the problem may be—there’s a coin that Hallgerd used to cast her spell. And that coin hasn’t been found.”

  My hand fell limp in Dad’s hold. My stomach did a little flip.

  “It’s possible,” Katrin said, “that the coin was consumed as well, but—”

  “No. It wasn’t.” I drew my hand free and reached into my pocket. I was only a little surprised to feel warm metal there. Sweat trickled down my neck. I’d thrown the coin away—in my room, and by the water, too. Somehow it always found me again.

  I pulled it out and set it on the table. The symbol on it looked a little like the symbols in Katrin’s notebook.

  Katrin’s shoulders stiffened. She grabbed my hands, not noticing the scars there. “You’re unharmed?”

  I nodded, frightened by her intense gaze, feeling a headache starting up. I forced myself to focus on Katrin’s words.

  “The coin must be returned to Hallgerd, at Hlidarendi in the east, where she used to live,” Katrin said. “Thorgerd—that’s Hallgerd’s daughter—left instructions for her descendants, and they were very clear on this point. Perhaps the spell will not be done until we follow those instructions. There’ve been too many small quakes this past year, and the pattern they form is unsettling. Yet if we return the coin, maybe the pattern will be ended.”

  “Enough.” Dad’s chair scraped the floor as he shoved it back. “Amanda ran away.” Did I think his voice was quiet before? It had been loud compared to how softly he spoke now. “We fought, and she ran, and no one knows what happened next. I’ll regret that fight—and other things, too, Katrin—for the rest of my life, but there was no magic involved.”

  I stared at the coin, afraid it would find its way back into my pocket if I dared look away. Katrin picked it up, then dropped it as if burned. The coin clattered to the table. “You’ll have to carry it,” she said, frowning. “We should go now. I don’t know how much time we have, but I’ll do what I can to save you from your mother’s fate.”