by J. J. Neeson
“But Thorston doesn’t practice magic,” Reigh said. “He told me so.”
“That doesn’t mean magic isn’t still in him, a magic he is aware of and has learned to control—most of the time. Thorston has Scandinavian ancestry, like you. With him thinking of home, and you arriving in it, no wonder the town felt the tempest.”
“So storms are our thing?”
“One of them. The climate in Scandinavia is ferocious. There’s snow. And there’s thunder. Your ancestors were skilled at taming the forces. They had to. If these forces were left to breed, it guaranteed cowardice amongst the brave, and death to the young.”
Lu rose abruptly from her seat. “It doesn’t really matter who brought the storm,” she snapped, frantic. “We need to focus on what the threat is so that we can stop it.”
“Calm down,” Mrs. Florence ordered kindly, a soothing in her voice. “You know what happens if you get all worked up. Did you have your tonic today?”
“Two,” Lu told her. She sat back in her chair and closed her eyes. “These days, I’m always close to the edge. An owl visited my house the day of the storm. We have to figure out what this threat is, and fast.”
With great concern, Mrs. Florence glanced over at Mama Blanchet. Neither said a word, but based on their expressions, whatever the owl represented, it wasn’t good.
“We’ll figure it out,” Reigh said, trying to comfort Lu. “Whatever is out there, I’m sure we’re stronger. If we weren’t, our prayers last night never would have worked. From what I can tell, the town enjoys its peace tonight. With the Northern Lights as a bonus.”
“You’re right,” Lu said, determined. “We have to be strong—all of us. Reigh, I’m going to drop by your place tomorrow. It’s time you fully accepted your ancestral magic. We’re going to need it. If you have the potential to raise a storm that let the threat in, you can send it back to the hell it came from.”
***
Reigh didn’t take the forested trail home after the meeting. She walked along the road where she could still see the Northern Lights above, ignoring the cars as they swerved around her, honking in protest. She could care less. She was angry and conflicted. Calder did not deserve the accusations thrown against him. Nor did she. But she felt no anger towards the others, only towards the threat that was tearing her away from her new home, the threat that made the others doubt her.
Rising her arms into the air as she walked, she tried to summon another storm, one that would help her destroy whatever stood between the nothingness she’d woken up to in Vegas and the fullness she’d found in Broken Ridge.
Above, a single dark cloud formed. Feeling the momentum of her convictions, she threw her energy into it. In answer, an electrical charge crackled around the cloud, sparking with a growing intensity until a single lightning bolt crashed down in front of her.
Reigh continued to walk, her head high, smiling with ferocity.
It was a start.
***
“What the hell were you thinking?” Thorston asked, outraged, when she stepped into the shack.
Reigh passed by where he stood near the couch and went to the mini-fridge. Damn, she thought. No beer.
“Reigh! You can’t play around with the forces of nature.”
“Why?” she challenged. “Because magic comes with a price?”
“No, not at all. But it’s like this… If you speed on your bike, you risk crashing into a tree. You summon a storm, then whatever threat Aunt Florence was telling me about can harness that energy for their own purposes.”
“How did you even know? It was only a single lightning bolt.”
“I felt it. My magic responds to yours, because of our ancestry. But that’s not the point.”
Reigh wasn’t in the mood to be lectured. Ignoring Thorston, she stretched, wondering if the convenience store still had six packs of Magic Ale-Chemy on sale.
Thorston wasn’t giving up that easily. “Reigh, I need you to take this seriously.”
“Fine, Thorston. Then what is the point? Tell me already.”
Her disregard finally reached him. “You know what, forget it. I don’t need this.” He grabbed his helmet and strode towards the door.
For reasons Reigh did not want to admit, seeing him turn his back on her only fuelled her temper. “Don’t you dare, Thorston. You have no right to walk out on me. I am not in the wrong here. Last night, magic was a novelty. But now, it’s real. And it has its monsters. My mind is gone. It’s gone. I’m half convinced that I’m high somewhere in the slums of Vegas with the delusion that this is actually happening. Magic is not meant to exist, but it does. I don’t even know what the fully means yet. I don’t know what anything means.” Exhausted, she fell on the couch.
Her angry incited his calm. “If it makes you feel better, nothing is meant to exist,” he said soothingly.
It irritated her. She stood back up and marched towards the bed, grabbing a T-shirt from the floor along the way. “No more riddles, please,” she pleaded, ripping off her one piece and pulling the T-shirt over her head, which was much too large for her. “I can’t stand any more ambiguity. I need to hear something solid.”
“That’s my T-shirt,” he muttered.
“Thorston!” she screamed, knowing her emotions were out of control.
“Let me explain what I meant. Samuel once told me something that has brought me comfort, especially during times like now. Forget magic for a minute.”
“Gladly,” she huffed.
“Mathematically, we are a near impossibility. An unimaginable number of events had to occur in exactly the right sequence for us to exist. Earth had to be a certain distance from the sun. Magnetic fields had to be strong enough to shield us from solar flares. There needed to be a moon of exactly the right size so that its gravitation pull could stir nutrients in the oceans to create life. The list is long and extensive. The odds that everything would happen as it did are unbelievable. And yet we’re here, likely because some higher force wants us here.”
“Like Norse gods?” she asked innocently, intrigued.
“Higher than that.”
Reigh flopped down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining it was the sky the Northern Lights moved across. The lights did help her to believe in a beauty and an intelligence that existed beyond comprehension.
“Did you see them?” she asked.
“I did,” Thorston replied, knowing what she meant. “What does Aunt Florence think they mean? When she called earlier to warn me that Lu would be stopping by tomorrow, she mentioned she had seen you this evening.”
“I know what they mean. It was Calder. He didn’t show tonight. But the lights did.”
Thorston had no reply.
“Thanks,” she said, sedated, her emotions no longer twisting around like a fox in search of a den. “What you said helped. If we’re an impossibility, then magic doesn’t seem like such a stretch. I feel more grounded.”
“Good. So stop wasting your talents trying to prove how bad-ass you are. Summoning a storm does no one any good.”
“Have you ever summoned a storm? Purposefully?” she asked, sitting up just enough to look at him.
“Plenty of times,” he revealed, his eyes growing dark. “I’ve made rain fall. I’ve made the lightning crash. But there is no virtue in a storm. There is only destruction.”
“Are we destructive? Because we’re Norse? They aren’t exactly known for their goodwill.”
“I see no destruction in you,” Thorston told her. “But I can’t say the same for myself.”
***
The next morning, Reigh could not wake. She remained in bed, thankful Mrs. Florence had given her the day off. Only when there was a knock on the door, hours past noon, did Reigh stir.
“Come in!” she shouted, finding her way out of her sheets.
Lu let herself into the shack. “You still sleeping?”
Reigh pulled on a pair of cut-offs beneath the crinkled T-shirt she wore. “Don’t read int
o it. I’m not depressed.”
“Just checking,” Lu said. Then she went to the nook and set a statue of the Virgin Mary on the countertop. “For guidance,” she explained. “Like your rune.”
“You’re Catholic?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“A little.”
Bowing before the Virgin Mary, Lu did a sign of the cross before answering. “Magic isn’t religion. It’s a talent, like playing—”
“Like playing a musical instrument. I know.”
“Or voicing an opinion. Or tying a shoe. I use the kinetic energy within my body to light a match with my hand the same way I do the energy of my psyche to make a candle light by blowing into it. Nothing about the power within me contradicts my belief in the holy.”
Damn. She loved Lu, but Jessa-Marie was right. She was a preachy princess, almost as much as Thorston was.
Lu moved to the couch and indicated for Reigh to join her. “And now, you will know the power within you.”
Yawning, Reigh stretched. She didn’t know what Lu was about to show her, but she wasn’t prepared. Completely opposite to the giddiness she’d felt the night of the pottery circle and the biker rally, she was reluctant to begin, siding more and more with Thorston’s decision not to practice magic at all.
“It’s important that you recognize magic isn’t some outside force that influences you. You are the force that influences the outside. Magic is within you. It is a thought that turns into an action, the same way all actions originate.”
“So if I want twisty fries for dinner, I just have to think about them?” Reigh asked. “Can we do that now? I’m starved.”
Lu laughed. “Like everything around us, magic is bound by laws of nature. You can will twisty fries to appear in front of you, sending a request out into the universe, and eventually a friend may call over unannounced with a bag of twisty fries from the local diner, but you can’t create something out of nothing.”
“You’re a friend,” Reigh said boldly.
Lu rolled her eyes. “Would you like to go get some twisty fries when this is all over?”
“No. You have a business to run and a family to take care of. I just wanted to prove that you don’t need magic for everything.”
“I see you’ve been talking to Thorston.”
“A little.”
Lu wasn’t happy, but she spoke with tolerance. “Don’t go into denial about the value of your magical abilities now. That owl I mentioned at the meeting yesterday—it is a belief in Mexico that an owl visiting the home is a warning that someone within that house will die. The owl came the night of the storm, when the threat was unleashed, and it’s been hanging around ever since. The threat is going to hurt someone I love. We have to stop it before it does.”
Much more attentive, Reigh cleared her head, opening her mind to what Lu had to say. She knew better than to cast the owl off as an outdated superstition. If Lu was scared, it meant she had a reason to be.
“I’m listening,” Reigh said, focusing. “What do I have to do?”
“Find yourself.”
“You have got to be joking. I’m almost thirty, and I haven’t a clue who I am. It’s the whole reason I left Vegas. I’m not going to figure it out in an afternoon.”
Lu was sympathetic. “You may feel a little lost to who you are, but I think you know what you are. I think everyone does. You are a creation of something much more beautiful than you realize, and as such, you have a power within you. Know your own power. Don’t look the other way.”
“That sounds all very pretty and motivational, but how? How do I know my own power?”
“Begin by visualizing yourself. See yourself in your mind, and value what you see.”
Closing her eyes, Reigh did as instructed. At first, she saw herself sitting on the couch next to Lu, but the image swiftly transitioned to her in Vegas working an afternoon shift at the thrift store she had surrendered ten years of her life to. The store was empty. She worked alone, keeping her own company as she stocked a shelf full of secondhand board games.
“What do you see?” Lu asked.
“Someone who is very lonely. And unexceptional,” Reigh admitted. Hearing her self-deprecation out loud, tears filled her eyes. “She has no one.”
“It’s okay to cry. Many do in the beginning. It’s like a catharsis. But don’t judge who you see. Forget the bad choices, the mistakes. View yourself from a higher perspective.”
Understanding, Reigh once again visualized herself in the thrift store. She looked past her shames, allowing her mind to go quiet. In the quiet, she felt compassion for the lost girl. As she did, a peace overcame her, a lightness that left her warm and whole.
And then she was the girl she saw. She was in the thrift store, a board game in hand. She could feel the cardboard of the game’s packaging, the weight of its pieces.
“Reigh,” a voice sang out.
Still at peace, she looked up, content. In the aisle stood a woman with long honey-colored hair and eyes so green, they could have held all the shades of the forest in them. With her finger, the woman drew the Othala rune into the air. It burnt blue, a fire so deep it ripped through the fabric of space and time.
Reigh opened her eyes. The room was dark around her. “Lu?” she called out.
There was no answer.
She stood, but her bare feet did not touch the hard wood of the shack. The floor was cold, like concrete. Unable to see in the pitch black, Reigh felt around. The room was furnished with bulky chairs and a side table, none of which gave her any indication of where she was at.
Trying to remain calm, she walked in a straight line, navigating around the furniture she bumped into until she found a wall. She followed the wall, which was as cold as the floor, sliding the palms of her hands across it until she reached a wide wooden door with an iron handle. She tugged at the handle, but the door was locked.
Wherever she was, she was trapped.
Chapter Seven
“Let me out!” Reigh cried, banging on the door. Her efforts echoed around her in the dark room, like ghostly laughter. “You can’t keep me in here!”
It didn’t make sense. The rune had never betrayed her. Its guidance had only ever offered protection. And the woman in her vision who wielded the rune had been born of love and warmth.
So why had the light cast her into the dark?
She continued to pound on the door. “Let me out!”
Footsteps sounded on the other side, hurried and frantic. Reigh ceased her pounding to listen, her ear pressed against the wood, her heart racing. There was a clatter of metal against metal, and then the door shook beneath her, and a sliver of light filled the room.
Reigh took a step back and prepared to confront her captor. She had pried herself away from her share of sleazy men in nightclubs, but she had never had to go on the attack before. She had no plan, only the instinct to fight.
“Another victim,” a man said as the door was pulled completely open.
A light beyond glared brightly. Instead of striking out, she held an arm up, squinting, unable to see anything more than patches of color.
“Reigh?” the man asked. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she said, trying to sound fierce despite her temporary blindness. “Why have you brought me here?”
He laughed. “Reigh, it’s Kaylock. You’re at the library. I didn’t bring you here. You arrived all on your own.”
Yes, it was Kaylock! She could match his voice, now that he had identified himself.
“The library?” she asked, confused. “Why am I here?”
His fingertips gently caressed her eyelids, allowing her to see again. She appeared to be standing in a cellar at the end of some corridor that had an army of wooden doors on either side.
“I’d like to know the same thing,” he said. “You’re not the first to accidently teleport themselves down here. Why must it always be the library? I’ve had to install motion detectors just to keep up.”
&n
bsp; “Can’t you just use magic instead of motion detectors?”
“I never said the motion detectors were electronic,” he said and smiled. “I see you’ve joined the pottery circle. I don’t know whether to congratulate you or console you. Mama Blanchet is a handful.”
Reigh couldn’t argue. “I don’t know if I’ve officially joined, but I’ve been to a meeting.”
“Oh, you’ve joined,” Kaylock proclaimed. “This room that you managed to lock yourself into—it’s for pottery circle members only. You wouldn’t have been allowed in if Mama Blanchet hadn’t accepted you as one of her girls.”
Touched, and a little surprised that Mama Blanchet had taken her in, Reigh turned to view the room. With the light from the corridor shining through, the furnishings were now visible, no longer hidden in the obscurity of the dark. The room was quite brilliant, with high-back leather chairs gathered in the center, forming a stately circle. The chairs were the only formality within the room. Pushed against the concrete walls were all the furnishings of comfortable living—a couch, recliners, bookshelves, tables, candlesticks, and boldly-colored cushions that were scattered around.
The highlight of the room was the wall to the right. A shelving unit had been installed along its entirety, upon which were hundreds of pottery pieces, from Greek-style ceramic vases to figurines of African women with baskets upon their heads. The wall was like a museum.
“Is this a private reading room?” she asked.
“It’s an everything room. This is where the circle usually meets.”
“Wow,” she breathed. “Mama Blanchet must have some influence to reserve a room like this solely for the pottery circle.”
“That she does, but to be fair, there are dozens of empty rooms down here in the basement—the malady of a big library in a small town. It’s good that at least some of the rooms are being put to use.”
“I wonder why she sent me here,” Reigh mused.
