Moon Dog Magic

by Jennifer Willis

  “Sally! Oh, my God.” Opal nearly dropped her teacup in her lap before the sun sneaked back behind the dark cloud cover.

  “What? What is it?”

  Opal got up from the table and tugged at Sally’s elbow, pulling her up from her chair. “When’s the last time you looked in a mirror?”

  The dark skies outside opened up into a full downpour.

  Slapping the steering wheel in time with the windshield wipers, Managarm pulled his mud-encrusted Suburban off Highway 26 onto the short drive leading into the wooded parking lot. The rain couldn’t have come at a better time—not the light, persistent sprinkle that was a near constant in the Pacific Northwest in the fall and winter, but a chilly, driving rain, one of the first of the season.

  It kept most meddlesome humans indoors, and washed Managarm’s vehicle clean.

  The Suburban sloshed through deep puddles and crunched on soggy gravel as the road curved into the parking area. Not another car in sight. Managarm smiled. He shifted the vehicle into park and shut off the engine. He sat behind the wheel, listening to the patter of rain on the metal hull of the car. It was a hollow, tinny sound compared to what he remembered of the rains coming down on a newly built longhouse, before the roof was lined with insulating turf.

  He closed his eyes and rested back against the vinyl seat. He imagined the Vikings’ early villages—rows of rectangular buildings with pitched roofs along the water’s edge. But Managarm preferred the country longhouses, their peat-block walls reinforced with hand-hewn planks, sitting and sleeping benches lined with furs, and a roaring fire in the center of the single room where bards spun their tales on long winter nights. If he concentrated, he could almost smell the animal skins and taste the freshly roasted game.

  Before long, Managarm thought, there will again be longhouses aplenty. Longhouses and fire pits and longships and raiders.

  Lots of raiders.

  He pulled the keys out of the ignition and stepped out of the car. The cold rain beat down on his uncovered head. Managarm shuddered in a thoroughly undignified manner and reached back into the car for a wide-brimmed rain hat, pushing it down firmly on his head even though it made him feel like a sissy. He zipped up his fleece pullover and pulled a long handsaw from behind the driver’s seat, then slammed the door shut.

  As the rain dripped off the brim of his hat and soaked through his blue jeans, Managarm stood and stared at what was left of the Sitka Spruce.

  Thousands of visitors over the years had made this same trek west of Portland, to have photos taken beside the 700-year-old giant and touch its trunk. It had been the largest of its kind in the United States. The humans had called it the Klootchy Creek Giant.

  “Yggdrasil,” Managarm hissed through his teeth.

  After seven centuries, the Tree had finally succumbed to a wicked wind storm. There was little more the Forest Service could do than cut down the ancient corpse.

  Managarm made his way toward the wide wooden ramp leading up to where the Sitka Spruce used to stand. Visitors still came to see the stump—nearly 100-feet tall, but deteriorating rapidly.

  Not unlike the old gods, Managarm sneered.

  He grunted when he sank shin-deep in a puddle. Cold water splashed over the top of his boot and seeped into his socks to chill his skin. Rain hadn’t been an issue before, nor cold. He felt himself growing weaker by the day, prone to the elements like a newborn goat.

  “Cursed Odin,” he grumbled.

  Managarm’s boots squished against the boards of the viewing ramp as he climbed to where the old Tree had once towered. Shreds of yellow caution tape littered the ground, left over from the spruce’s last days.

  Managarm rested his hand on the rotting bark. Damp dust sifted out beneath his fingers. This was the nearest he’d ever been to the Yggdrasil. There were no more immortal protectors or divine charms to keep a lower deity away.

  Managarm turned his face upward and let the rain fall on his cheeks and closed eyes. Then he laughed out loud.

  Come this time Sunday, Odin would be no better than the old Tree’s rotting husk.

  Managarm took a quick look around to confirm he didn’t have an audience, then jumped off the platform onto the soggy ground below. He ducked beneath the structure to approach the base of the massive stump. Gripping the saw in one hand, he reached out with the other to rest his palm against the remains of the Tree, and he listened.

  Managarm smiled. There was no life left in the old World Tree, but there were traces yet of its magick.

  He surveyed the perimeter of the hulking stump and found a large, protruding burl low to the ground on the far side. He laid his large hand on the knot and touched the blade of his handsaw to the wood. And froze.

  Planning to slice into the sacred Tree was one thing; actually doing it was another. Once he started, there was no turning back.

  Managarm closed his eyes as if to pray. Instead of words of supplication or reverence, all that stirred within was more poison. He thought about his mission—the useless one Odin had given him, and the quest he’d designed for himself.

  “I will be a slave no longer!” he shouted against the hard rain as the teeth of his saw bit into the old Tree.

  It was slower going than he’d expected, but then he’d never sawed into the Yggdrasil before. Hunched over with cold rain running down the back of his neck, he cursed Odin and most every other member of the Norse pantheon with every stroke.

  The saw came at last to the bottom of the burled knot, and a thick slab of wood nearly eighteen inches in diameter fell free to the ground. Managarm rested the saw against the base of the dead Tree and weighed the chunk of gnarled wood in his hands.

  Yes. This would do just fine.

  He took a step back and stared at the stump. The smallest pang of guilt pulled at his stomach. It wasn’t the Tree’s fault. The Yggdrasil was a font of wisdom and power with no control over how it was used. This old shell was one of many over the millennia, as each new World Tree took root and grew tall and strong, and then ultimately died and rotted away, only to be born anew in an endless cycle set into motion long before Managarm’s time.

  Managarm could feel his lips turning blue, and his jeans were drenched and sticking to his skin. Cradling the wooden slab in one arm, he picked up the handsaw and headed back toward the car.

  He yanked open the door of the Suburban. Rusty hinges protested in a loud, squeaking groan. Managarm slipped the saw back behind the driver’s seat. He slid in behind the wheel and rested the round piece of wood on the seat beside him. It wasn’t until he started up the engine that he realized he’d been holding his breath.

  He’d just hacked into the sacred Tree, and the others hadn’t lifted a finger to stop him.

  “Stupid fools.” Managarm hit the headlights and switched on the windshield wipers. “They probably don’t even realize I’m doing them a favor.”

  He turned east onto Highway 26, heading back toward Portland and the Fred Meyer where he’d stop off for supplies for the night before he disappeared again into the forest to continue his work.

  Water bottles. Matches. A few loaves of bread. Maybe some fruit. Several packages of hot dogs and some canned spaghetti or whatever else was fast and convenient. A replacement camp stove. A new tent and sleeping bag wouldn’t hurt, particularly after he’d burnt up the last ones—and pretty much his entire camp—that morning.

  Managarm’s stomach rumbled loudly, and he cursed. Damned Odin and his meddling! He’d saddled them all with this sluggish descent into mortality. Managarm cheered himself with the thought of an aging, impotent Odin having to face Fenrir at Ragnarok. No longer the stuff of legend, but just a few days away.

  And coffee. He definitely needed more coffee.

  5

  Heimdall steered his dented, government-issue pick-up truck along the dirt paths that passed for service roads through the forest. It was just past noon, and he was technically on his regular forestry shift, but his mind was hardly on his job.

&nb
sp; His stomach still felt sour after a tense telephone conversation with Maggie while he’d forced a fast-food breakfast down his throat—it was phone it in or stand her up altogether. It was a miracle Maggie was still talking to him. The stress was also taking a toll on his appetite, and Frigga was starting to take it personally. The look on his mother’s face two days earlier when he’d passed up a third helping of roasted beets still sent a shiver down his spine.

  And he hadn’t found the Tree.

  He was getting closer. His cousin, Freya, felt it, too. She was on her own hunt through the forest, approaching from the opposite direction on an intercept course. But every hour the Yggdrasil remained unprotected was another hour closer to possible disaster.

  Laika snored loudly next to him on the imitation leather seat. He reached over and dug his fingers into her warm ruff, and she rested her head on his thigh.

  Freya had called a few minutes earlier to give an update on her Tree hunt—neither of them had much to report—and to remind him that the New Moon would reach its peak at 1:32 a.m. Sunday. They had just over 60 hours to find and claim the Tree.

  That would normally be a challenge, but not an impossible task. The last time they’d gone hunting for the Yggdrasil, they hadn’t been trying to keep office hours or do shift work. Sneaking off into the woods for months at a time hadn’t been much of an issue in the 1300s.

  But with the astronomical convergence breathing down their necks, the stakes couldn’t be any higher.

  First, he’d been mysteriously knocked flat while hunting for the Yggdrasil. Then, there was the call just now over the Forest Service radio about an illegal campsite in Forest Park. That in itself wasn’t all that unusual, but this one was apparently charred so badly that it looked like the site of a missile strike. Heimdall was on his way there now, to pick through the ashes and try to figure out what had happened. After that, his afternoon was likely to be full of paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork.

  All in all, not a good day.

  Heimdall followed the winding road as it turned sharply to the left and narrowly missed a low-hanging branch that easily could have shattered his windshield. Then he hit a deep pothole. His cell phone skittered across the dashboard, and Laika startled awake as she bounced precariously in the passenger seat. She whined.

  “Sorry about that, girl.”

  The rain was starting up again. Heimdall turned on the windshield wipers and frowned. Wet earth could mute the Yggdrasil’s signal. A hard rain, not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest in autumn, would make the Tree more difficult to track.

  His cell phone rang, and Heimdall swerved slightly to the right, catching the phone in his hand as it slid toward him.

  “Yeah!” he yelled over the noise of the pick-up’s engine. Heimdall figured Oregon’s law against driving while talking or texting on cell phones didn’t apply to ancient gods on a mission.

  It was his mother. On instinct, Heimdall eased off the gas pedal.

  “Yes, Frigga. You got my message.” He gripped the steering wheel tightly and interjected before she started grilling him on what he’d had for breakfast. “Listen, we can discuss my daily intake of salted salmon later. I need to talk to you about what happened this morning. I don’t know what it was. It was like getting hit by an invisible tidal wave. But I wasn’t followed, so I don’t—”

  “Oh, there’s a Berserker on the loose. Thought you should know,” Frigga interrupted.

  Heimdall nearly dropped the phone. He slowed the truck as quickly as was safely possible, and shifted into park. Laika looked from him to the trees outside the truck, then curled up in a ball on the seat and closed her eyes.

  Heimdall scratched Laika behind the ears. “I’m sorry,” he said into the phone. “You’ll have to say that again. It sounded like you said—”

  “A Berserker. Just this morning.”

  Heimdall felt the jolt of adrenaline in his system. “Are you sure?”

  Frigga sighed on the other end of the phone. “Thor and Odin both saw the awakening. I’m pretty sure they’d know a Berserker when they saw one.”

  “When exactly—”

  “Shortly after your mystery pummeling, from the sound of it.”

  “Can we please not call it that?”

  “Whatever you want. Your invisible assailant, then.” Frigga cleared her throat, and Heimdall could tell she was trying to sound nonchalant. “At the high school. One of the students. Fifteen years old.”

  “Of all the cursed . . .” Heimdall slammed his fist onto the steering wheel, accidentally hitting the horn and startling Laika. “Whose brilliant idea was it to initiate a Calling? Berserkers are absolutely no help where the Yggdrasil is concerned. Or do I have to remind everyone, yet again, about what happened back in Cimbria?”

  “It wasn’t us.”

  Heimdall shifted the phone to his other ear. “Say again?”

  “I said, it wasn’t us. We didn’t call the Berserker.”

  Heimdall almost laughed. “You know that’s impossible.”

  There was a long pause before Frigga answered. “Apparently not.”

  Heimdall dug his free hand into his thick hair. His mind raced through all the Calling rituals he could remember—quite a few in the early centuries of the Dark Ages, fewer in the Golden Era of the Vikings, and perhaps a half-dozen since the discovery of the Americas. Whenever the half-crazed warriors were needed, Odin gathered his family for the powerful rite that called forth the Berserkers. They were a stubborn and willful lot, prone to violent pranks and ear-splitting cackling that Heimdall had never appreciated, not to mention their voracious appetites. But they were devoted to their gods, with special fealty to Thor and Odin until the end.

  Heimdall gripped the phone tighter until he heard the plastic casing begin to crack. “How many?”

  “Just the one, as far as we know. Your father and brother were talking to the young man when the awakening hit him.”

  “A single Berserker? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “And a dark chill immediately before that nearly knocked them off their feet.”

  Heimdall was only half-listening. His midsection was still sore from the blow to the gut he’d taken, and his thoughts ran back to sitting in the dirt just a few hours earlier, and the cold tingling that had rushed through his body.

  “It sounds rather similar to what you reported,” Frigga continued. “I didn’t notice anything. Neither did Freya. It’s the same with Freyr and Bragi. I’m not sure what that means. I’ve not heard from Saga yet, but that’s hardly surprising.”

  Heimdall glanced out the truck’s window, now obscured by thick raindrops. He fully expected to see a rogue band of Berserkers marching along the dirt forest road, but he was surrounded by nothing but trees and mud. “I think it’s worth a consultation with the Nornir.”

  “They’re my next call, if I can get through. You know how they can be.” Frigga’s voice tightened. The Norse Fates weren’t as all-seeing as they used to be. The Nornir could be invaluable when it came to foreseeing the best harvest and hunting dates, giving job-hunting advice, and locating lost keys. But their predictions on larger issues were usually impossibly cryptic.

  “You’d think if they had any information to share, they would contact us first,” Frigga continued, exasperated. “But they’re still caught up in the old rituals, wanting all seekers, mortal and immortal alike, to petition the ancient oracles.”

  Heimdall closed his eyes and tried to tune his mother out. Invisible shocks of cold. Campsite in ashes. Random Berserker . . .

  “And it’s not like they’re hurting for attention, with that ridiculous 900-number hotline they’re operating.”

  Heimdall gritted his teeth and pounded again on the car horn. “Cursed, bloody Muspellheim!”

  Laika jumped up from her nap with a yelp.

  “Heimdall? Is everything all right?”

  “Call a family meeting! Now!” Heimdall shouted into the phone as he shifted the truck into drive. L
aika sat up, tail wagging at the possibility of resuming their car ride through the woods. She pawed at the controls to roll down the passenger-side window and stuck her head out into the rain.

  “We’re already gathering to discuss the Berserker at the Lodge this evening.”

  “Not good enough. We’ve got an emergency!” Heimdall hit the gas. The truck lurched forward on the muddy road, and Heimdall struggled to steer with one hand while he held the phone to his ear. “It’s not just the Berserker. Someone besides us is after the young Yggdrasil.”

  “I look like a hag!” Sally protested as she and Opal navigated around a large puddle in the crosswalk. She pulled up the hood of her hot-pink rain jacket against the rain and hurried to keep up with Opal. She glanced at the low ceiling of gray clouds and tried to ignore the uncomfortable chill settling into her prematurely aging bones. “Next thing you know, my teeth are going to start falling out!”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Not that bad?!” Sally grabbed Opal by the sleeve. “I have lines across my face! My hands are wrinkled! My hair is all white! I’m turning into an old lady.” Sally started to hyperventilate.

  “Mmm. I’d say you look more middle-aged than old. Maybe not even that. More like 40,” Opal offered. “Maybe.”

  “I look 40?!” Sally shrieked. A man in an expensive trench coat glanced at her as he hurried past. Hands shaking, Sally clutched her bookbag against her chest, being careful not to crush Baron inside, and wiped moisture away from her cheeks, not knowing if it was the rain or her tears. “But that’s ancient. I’m only 16!”

  Opal took Sally’s arm and kept walking up NW 12th Avenue toward Burnside.

  “Look, we’re going to get to the bottom of this, all right? Besides, I’d say your hair is more streaked with silver, not completely white.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” Sally laughed bitterly. She glanced at the storefronts as they passed. Before she embarked on her magickal quest to save the world, she would have stopped in at Cargo to peruse the funky imports, and then grabbed a hot chocolate and a scoop of pear sorbetto at Mio Dolce. But in her present state, she silently cursed the small pleasures she’d denied herself while planning and implementing Odin’s Return.