“I think so.” Sally walked over to one of the bookshelves and ran her fingers over the spines of Loki’s old books. They were dusty, despite having been moved into this space within just the past year or two. She knew without opening their covers that many of them were handwritten accounts of chaos magick from practitioners across the ages. A few of the volumes were singed from the draugar attack on Loki’s previous domicile. There weren’t nearly enough of them, she thought, to answer all the questions that kept bubbling up.
She wanted to be angry with Loki for not being here now to guide and advise her, but she hadn’t exactly made that easy on him the past couple of years. She imagined she knew just enough to be particularly dangerous—and now she had even more power to match it. But maybe she’d absorbed some of his hard-earned wisdom, too. Loki hadn’t had any mentor at all, and he’d managed to do all right. Eventually.
“So, you’re what? The source of all the magick in the world now?” Opal tried to laugh, but it broke Sally’s heart to see the fear in her friend’s eyes.
“I guess.” Sally’s voice sounded small and uncertain to her own ears. She started to silently criticize herself for not displaying more confidence and resolve, but who was to say how or what she should or shouldn’t be? “I’ll need to see about gathering up all the chaos that got away. If that’s even possible.”
Sally wanted to rush excitedly to her friend and talk about everything that had happened. She wanted Opal’s advice on how she should go about fixing all the damage that had been done to Portland and elsewhere—if that was even her responsibility now. She wanted to scream and laugh and cry with her friend, holding hands for comfort and encouragement as they figured out all the little pieces of what needed to happen next. But Sally held back. Opal might still be her friend, but there was a reason Loki had taken such pains to keep his distance. Now Sally instinctively followed his example.
Opal nodded and swallowed. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands and looked like she was trying to decide whether it was safe to enter the cottage and go back to work on her healing remedies. Sally dipped her head and moved away from the work table. Opal appeared physically relieved as she stepped forward and got to work with one of the stone pestles.
Sally didn’t think that Maggie had passed her supernatural role over to anyone—not even to Opal—the way that Iduna had bestowed her gifts on Maggie. So many of Odin’s kin had been lost. Her own detachment surprised her. She rationalized that she was still in shock from the battle and still adjusting to this crazy new normal, but she also remembered how maddeningly cool and aloof Loki had often appeared. She understood now that it hadn’t stemmed from any lack of caring.
She didn’t worry over who was journeying to Valhalla and who was being sent elsewhere—or about how Hel was dealing with the sudden influx of magickal dead. For the space of a few breaths, Sally’s brain churned on the possibility of surviving Valkyries, Einherjar, or Berserker warriors rising up to assume the traditional roles of the Norse pantheon. But her blood and bones knew that was unlikely to happen. A new order would gradually piece itself together and climb to its own ascendant. It’s how it had always happened before. She knew that now.
Was she angry with Freya and Maggie for not letting her in on their plan? Maybe. She was feeling too much to parse out any single blessing or grievance for long.
Sally dug into her pocket and produced her bag of Yggdrasil runes. She laid them on Opal’s work table and then backed away.
“For you,” Sally said.
Opal’s pestle paused as she stared at the pouch of runes. “Those belong to the Rune Witch, Sally. Those belong to you.”
“I can’t be the Rune Witch any more. Maybe nobody can. But someone should have those. I’d like it to be you.”
Opal pulled the runes toward her. “I’ll take good care of them.”
Sally shrugged and turned toward the hearth. The air from the open door was cool on her back. Laika lay on her side, warming her belly by the fire. The wolf-dog had earned her rest, and she and Sally both would need to gather their strength for the work that was to come.
Sally fixed herself a mug of one of Loki’s special teas—she thought it was the one for meditation and insight. She’d find out soon enough. She settled into a cushioned armchair by the hearth and watched the flames dance. Behind her, Opal’s pestle clinked against the stone mortar as she ground more herbs for the wounded warriors.
Keeper of the Realms or not, she wasn’t as special as she’d thought herself to be. There were many more human beings in the world with magickal ability than she’d realized. Maksim and his parents were proof of that. With the accidental unmooring of Loki’s magick, and her inability to gather all of it back to herself, many of those people would now be more powerful. And she imagined they would probably be very confused as well. She was going to have to do something about that.
Sally sipped her tea and thought back to those quiet, dark hours in her bedroom with her cat when she was casting her spell of Odin’s Return. She wasn’t quite enough of a narcissist to believe that’s where Ragnarok had started. But those flawed, naïve efforts to create a better world had maybe, finally, come to some kind of fruition, albeit painful and devastating.
She wrapped her hands around the heavy mug and warmed her fingers. The wood in the hearth popped. Laika lifted her head, blinked up at Sally, and then went back to sleep. Sally let her eyes lose focus as she gazed into the glowing embers, and she fell into an easy trance. Light and dark. Chaos and order. Everything in balance. Was she merely a caretaker, or could she assert her power and influence?
As her friend worked on her healing salves and teas, Sally Dahl sat by the fire and envisioned the new world as it might be, and she vowed to do better this time.
Epilogue
He stood beside the displays of tomatoes, turnips, cucumbers, green beans, and corn. Everything had been harvested by hand within the previous twenty-four hours, and the produce shone in the mid-morning sun as he sprayed each open box of vegetables with a mister.
Carol had warned him—many times before, and twice just this morning—not to spritz the vegetables too much. They didn’t want rot to set in. But it wouldn’t do to have their organically grown produce drying out at the Naghatune Bay farmers market.
He was forgetful. He didn’t think he had always been like this. He had snippets of memories from some time before—not too far in the past, he didn’t think. He smiled when he got flashes of battles and barbecues and magick and monsters. But he’d stopped sharing those glimmers of memory with Carol. She was just as likely to tell him he’d been watching too much television as she was to encourage him to dream.
She’d gotten him a fancy phone and programmed it with alarms to remind him of harvesting times, when he should be loading the crates of tomatoes into the truck, and how often he needed to mist the vegetables at the market. But he never could get the phone to work right. It kept playing random YouTube videos of sled dogs or just showed him a black screen.
“That’s enough for now,” Carol called over to him. She was busy ringing up another market customer, a lady in a flowered hat. “Nice work.”
He put the mister down on the pavement under the display of cucumbers. Carol’s Farm did a brisk business in the summer and into the fall at the weekly market in the small town. The kale in particular always sold out quickly, as did the apples. If he bit into one of those apples, he wondered, would he have his secret destiny revealed to him? Would he gain immortal life?
Carol pulled a bag of apples off the scale and handed them to the lady in the hat, then she walked over to pat him on the shoulder. “No time for daydreaming, I’m afraid. Why don’t you put out some more tomatoes?”
He turned toward the truck and strode only a few steps before he heard a plaintive, feline yowl behind him. He paused and waited for his friend to dart out from beneath the corn stand. The cat was a blur of orange and black as he streaked across the pavement.
�
��Good kitty, Barry.” He stooped to scratch the cat behind the ears. It seemed like he’d always known this cat. He knew they’d traveled together to get here, to begin this strange new life on the Oregon Coast. But he also seemed to recollect that Barry had once been special to someone else, a girl with red-gold hair.
He stood and looked past the parking lot where the organic growers, artisan weavers, and kitchen apothecaries sold their wares on Saturday mornings. He gazed across the two-lane street. Between a pair of old, recently painted wooden buildings, he could see the sandy shore where Naghatune Bay met the Pacific Ocean. He tuned out the bluesy serenade of the acoustic trio of banjo, mandolin, and guitar on the market stage and the sounds of so many shoppers, their excited and tired toddlers in plastic strollers, and their dogs on leashes barking at each other. Barry wound figure-eights between his legs as he listened instead for the sound of the surf. He knew instinctively that the tide was coming in. He wondered what might wash ashore with it.
“Loki!” Carol called from her station at the register. A four-person line of impatient customers stood before her waiting to make their purchases. When Carol caught his eye, she waved him toward the nearly empty display of tomatoes.
He nodded and turned again toward the truck, parked in the shade. Barry followed him. He liked it when Carol used his name. It helped him remember who he was, or who he used to be. In actuality, he couldn’t guess when or if he might know himself again, but the truth felt like it was there, just beyond the edge of his awareness, lurking in the shadows.
Was Carol helping him, or keeping him captive? He startled at the thought, but it wasn’t the first time it had occurred to him. Maybe she was simply babysitting him until the world needed him again, and then he would awake to himself. He glanced down at Barry, whose purr was loud and aggressive as the cat rubbed against his shins. He had the stirring feeling that he had bigger and more important things to tend to, or to observe, than so many boxes of cucumbers and corn. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing instead, but it sang in his blood all the same.
He grabbed another crate of tomatoes from beneath the tarp in the back of Carol’s pickup truck and ambled toward her market stall. Barry kept brushing against his legs, never enough to trip him up but with the insistence of a pressing errand he kept forgetting about. He had the distinct impression Barry was trying to tell him something.
After the fresh tomatoes were put out to be picked over and purchased, he turned again to watch the waves in the distance. The rhythm helped steady him, the cycling ebb and flow a microcosm of the waxing and waning energies of the Cosmos. Everything ended, only to begin anew. Old friends were never truly lost; they merely returned wearing different faces. He frowned. Where had that thought come from?
A little girl stood next to the boxes of apples. She was maybe ten years old, Loki thought, and her white-blond ponytail glinted in the sun. Her father filled a paper bag with green beans while she looked over the yellow and red fruit. She told her father she was hungry, but he promised her a cookie when they got back to the car.
“Help you find something?” Loki asked the father. He didn’t mind the bustle of the market, but he always felt relieved when it was over. The nearness of others, over time, made him nervous. Carol told him he was silly to worry that he might accidentally hurt someone, that his was an old and gentle soul and a bunch of other wise aphorisms that left him feeling like he’d eaten too much candy.
“How fresh is the corn?” the man asked by way of reply.
“Picked last night and this morning,” Loki said.
The father moved deeper into the stall to rummage through the ears of unshucked sweet corn, but the girl kept her place beside the apple bin. Barry peeked out from beneath the display and made her laugh. Loki plucked out a shiny piece of fruit and offered it to her. When he pressed his finger to his lips to keep their secret, she smiled and took the apple from his hand. She had bright, clear eyes that sparkled with shy intelligence. He wished he could remember who she reminded him of.
“Beyond anything else, always follow your instincts,” he told her. “Life itself is magick.”
Her father returned and made her put the apple back. He paid for the beans and corn, and the girl glanced back at Loki as she and her father walked down the row of stalls to a bakery vendor.
Another lady in another flowered hat was talking to Carol at the register about how different it was in Naghatune Bay; she was from out of town and looking for “special” produce. He overheard the honey seller in the next stall complain about the tourists flocking to the area.
“It’s good for business, I guess, but now it’s just like those hippie places,” the honey man lamented. “Like Sedona or Mt. Shasta. So many wanderers seeking enlightenment, when all I’ve got for them is honey.”
There followed some chuckling at the suggestion of marketing his products as “enchanted liquid sunshine” or “golden bee elixir.”
Loki smiled and grabbed the girl’s apple out of the bin. He turned slowly northward, his gaze tracing the slices of water he could see between the buildings. He privately saluted first the lighthouse standing sentinel on a rocky outcropping, and then the mountains on the other side of the inlet. Whatever the locals and the tourists called it, he could feel the magick in this place. He would remember who he was. The power here was both old and new, and it was wild and untamed.
He bit into the apple and laughed. He didn’t know much, but he knew this was why he was here—him and the cat. He felt it in his bones. Naghatune Bay was a place where anything was possible.
Wait!
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Author's note:
On the end of a series
I wrote the first volume in this series on a lark. It was November 2008, and another National Novel Writing Month was underway. I’d published exactly one novel prior to that point (Rhythm, in 2001, an indie book before indie books were cool or even feasible) and had drafted several more but I didn’t yet have a clear direction with my work.
It’s arguable that I still don’t have a clear direction with my work, but that autumn I decided to take a stab at writing something in one of my favorite genres. I’d never attempted urban fantasy before and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, but I had a lot of fun with that first draft of Valhalla—what was later renamed Moon Dog Magic in the Rune Witch rebrand. I hadn’t expected to write a sequel, much less an entire series.
That was ten years ago now, and this is the last book in this series. I think. It’s possible I may jump backward in time or move sideways for more stories with these same characters, but I’m not promising anything. I am starting a new cozy/paranormal mystery series in the same universe as the Rune Witch books, but (most of) these characters will enjoy a well-deserved rest for now.
It’s been quite a journey bringing these stories to life. My hope is that you’ve enjoyed them enough to make it this far, and I’m grateful for your tolerance of my missteps. I am especially grateful for your enthusiasm and encouragement along the way.
Ten years is a long time to spend on any one project—an eternity in the world of indie publishing. But this bittersweet experience of brining one last Rune Witch story to the world has been worth every moment of frustration and doubt. And now I’m looking forward to what comes next.
I hope I’ll see you there.
— Jennifer Willis
Portland, Oregon
25 December 2018
Also by Jennifer Willis
Rhythm
The Rune Witch series: urban fantasy
Moon Dog Magic
Elements of Magic
Raven Magic
Chaos Magic
Twilight Magic
Haunted Coast series: cozy/paranormal mystery (coming in 2019)
Mars Adventure Romance Series (MARS): sci-fi romance
Mars Ho!
Lovers and Lunatics
Mars Heat
For news of future books, occasional freebies, and other updates, please visit jennifer-willis.com and/or sign up for my readers list.
Acknowledgments
The final product of this book may be entirely my own fault, but the story has been influenced along the way by so many people who have supported me in my ridiculous mission. I hope they won’t mind my calling them out here.
The Masked Hucksters, ever and always. I cannot overemphasize the importance of a good writers’ group, and man, I really lucked out with this one. Dale, Wendy, Rebecca, and I have been working together and supporting each other for more than five years now and we’re still going strong. They helped to brainstorm the bones of this story and seem to have a rather high threshold for my quirks. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Maplewood Coffee & Tea, my go-to writing space away from home. Every writer should have one of these places, too, where you feel welcome and can be happily productive for a while.
Rob Gonzalez, for being an excellent and caring friend, and for swooping in with a near-perfect occupational rescue when things were looking rather grim. Also, thank you for not forcing me to eat too many cookies while I was in New York.
Bryan Cohen—have I mentioned lately how awesome Bryan is? This guy is smart and talented and incredibly giving. I am still benefiting from the couple of days I spent with him in Chicago, walking through the city and mapping out my productive future. Getting to know him marked a positive turning point.
Twilight Magic (Rune Witch Book 6) Page 27
