The Black Pool (Valhalla Book 3)

by Jennifer Willis

  “Goddess of the Grove,” Heimdall muttered into his stein.

  Frigga patted Heimdall on the knee. “You did well, choosing that one.”

  “Iduna’s the one who passed her gifts to Maggie,” Heimdall replied.

  “And now we are to have another sacred well!” Frigga clapped her hands together and smiled up at Maggie as she came back into the room.

  Maggie crossed toward Heimdall, and he dutifully moved over to allow her to sit down next to him. She was the only one in the room with a napkin, which she draped neatly across her lap. She scooped a modest amount of cabbage onto her fork.

  “I can’t promise it will be the same fount of wisdom and knowledge that you remember. I’ll never replace Mímir, the original keeper of the well.” Maggie took a bite of food and swallowed. “Nor Iduna for that matter.”

  “No one expects you to,” Heimdall told her softly.

  Maggie looked down at her plate. “I just want to do my part.” She pushed the food around with her fork.

  Heimdall looked at Freya and Freyr. “Everyone’s got passports, right?”

  Maggie looked sharply at Heimdall. “Another trip?”

  Heimdall shrugged. “Yeah, it looks that way. Probably leaving tonight, if we can manage it.”

  Maggie stood up. “Actually, I don’t think I’m really all that hungry.” She carried her plate back to the kitchen and shoved a bunch of tupperware around in the refrigerator to make room for it.

  Thor caught Heimdall’s eye from across the fire. “What did you do this time?”

  Heimdall looked away and drained his stein.

  Freya and Freyr got up from the sofa. “We should head back to the dojo and make arrangements to close up for a while.”

  Odin nodded, dismissing them.

  Freyr waited until they were outside the Lodge and headed toward his car before speaking.

  “They’re not going to be happy, when they get the full story,” he said.

  “We don’t know for sure ourselves what’s happening.” Freya slid inside and buckled her seat belt. “And by the time we do know, we’ll be six thousand miles away, and back in our homeland. Unless Odin’s there himself, there won’t be much he can do about it.”

  5

  Sally awoke the next morning to the sound of banging coming from the sitting room.

  “Holy hellcats,” Sally grumbled as she yanked back the blankets and swung her feet to the floor. “What now?”

  She checked the clock and wasn’t surprised to find it was nearly noon. It had been past 2 a.m. by the time she and Clare returned from the pub, and they’d taken an inconvenient and circuitous route back to the flat trying to dodge the mysterious “fireflies” that followed them.

  More troubling, only Sally had been able to see them.

  Then Clare had sat up another hour complaining about the fake talisman and digging at Sally to reveal her own magickal secrets.

  Sally squinted at the sunlight streaming into her room. She shoved her feet into her slippers and pulled on a sweatshirt over her pajamas. She peeked out into the sitting room, fully expecting to find Clare doing some experimenting drumming.

  The room was empty. The banging stopped.

  “Clare?” Sally whispered. A strange scratching noise started up in a far corner. “I swear, if you adopted some kind of rodent without asking me first . . .”

  Sally realized how stupid that sounded—as though bringing home a street rat would be fine just as long as Clare had given advanced warning. The scratching noise grew more frantic. What if Clare really had brought in some wild animal in hopes of making it her familiar, much as Baron the cat had assisted Sally?

  Sally stepped into the sitting room. If it was indeed a rat in the corner, her portly cat likely wouldn’t have been much help even if she had been able to bring him to Ireland.

  “Clare?” Sally called again. “Are you here?”

  The door to the second bedroom opened, and a bleary-eyed Clare appeared in the threshold. She brushed her disheveled hair out of her eyes.

  “What?” she demanded.

  The scratching in the corner stopped.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you. I just heard some weird noises and wondered if you knew anything about it.”

  Clare shuffled into the room and collapsed into an upholstered armchair. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Yeah, I think it stopped.”

  Just as the words left Sally’s mouth, the scratching started again, but at the opposite corner of the room. Sally pointed to where she guessed the noise was coming from. “There! Do you hear that?”

  Clare cracked her eyes open and listened for a moment. “It’s an old building, Sally. There’s always a clanging pipe or weird creaking in the middle of the night.”

  Clare sat suddenly upright.

  “OOH!” Clare’s eyes opened wide as a mischievous smile spread across her face. “Maybe it’s a ghost. Edward Ford’s ghost!” Clare glanced about the room. “They say he’s supposed to stroll around outside Rubrics at sunset. Have you seen an old guy with a wig and knee pants up here?”

  Sally sighed. “It’s not a ghost.” At least, she hoped it wasn’t. Sally walked to the window. The last thing she needed was to have to contend with some restless spirit infesting her campus flat. She threw open the gold-and-tan curtains. Sunlight poured into the sitting room—and all hell broke loose.

  Books flew off shelves and landed in chaotic heaps on the floor, their leaves stirring in a non-existent breeze. Cabinet doors blew open with the explosive ejection of hats, scarves, board games, and Clare’s implements of magick. Not two seconds later, all of Sally’s research notes on the Magna Carta were jettisoned from the coffee table and fluttered about the room like loose feathers in the wind. Both bedroom doors slammed shut.

  Sally noticed that even in Clare’s excitement, her roommate pulled her legs up beneath her in the chair and clutched at her nightshirt with whitening knuckles.

  “It’s a poltergeist!” Clare exclaimed. “Excellent!”

  There was a knock on the outer door, startling a girlish squeal out of Clare. Keeping a careful eye out for anything that might suddenly fly at her head, Sally went to answer the door as her roommate sat giggling.

  Sally wracked her brain trying to figure out what might be behind the blustery mayhem in the apartment. She couldn’t blame the Køjer Devil runes—they had long since been destroyed. She herself hadn’t worked any magick in weeks.

  Sally rested her hand on the doorknob and sighed. She’d have to have Clare take her point-by-point through every spellcasting, candle lighting, and random witchy thought she’d had since setting foot in the apartment.

  “Fabulous,” Sally grumbled.

  “Pol-ter-geist! Pol-ter-geist!” Clare sang and clapped her hands together.

  “You have a seriously warped idea of fun, you know that?” Sally opened the apartment door.

  Niall stood in the outer hallway. He had his bookbag slung over one shoulder and hefted a grocer’s bag over the other. He glanced down at Sally’s pajama pants and slippers. “Have I come ‘round too early? I can return later, if you’d like.”

  Clare was still chanting about their supposed haunting. Sally ran a hand through her tangle of strawberry-blond hair and moved aside to let Niall enter. “Now’s just as good a time as any.”

  Niall stepped inside and stopped just short of a crumpled pile of notes and open books strewn across the carpet. “Sorry I missed the party.”

  Spotting Niall, Clare leapt out of her chair with a high-pitched yelp. She grabbed at her baggy nightshirt and tugged on the hem in a play to cover her knees.

  “Oh! Oh!” Clare squealed in flirtatious dismay. “Don’t look at me! Don’t!”

  Clare danced around like this for several moments, making a great display of attempted modesty while not actually doing much to cover herself, and making it impossible to ignore her. Niall shrugged and turned his back on Clare, giving him the opportunity to smile at Sally i
nstead.

  “Why don’t you get dressed, Clare,” Sally suggested, then she looked down at her own pajamas. “I should do the same.” She looked up at Niall. “Sorry about all this. We had a very strange night and then . . .” She gestured around at the general mess of the sitting room. “Would you believe all this only just happened?”

  Niall raised his eyebrows.

  Sally directed him to the flat’s tiny kitchen near the door. “We’ve got an electric kettle for tea.” She started backing toward her own bedroom. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back out in a jiffy.”

  “I’ll put on the tea, then,” Niall replied with a gracious smile, and Sally felt an unexpected tingle in her stomach.

  Behind her closed bedroom door, Sally scurried out of her pajamas and reached for the same sweater she’d worn the night before. Remembering the tear in her jeans, Sally sighed and dug another pair out of her small chest of drawers. She used her fingers to comb out most of the knots in her hair, then kicked her pajamas under the bed and headed back out into the sitting room.

  Incredibly, Clare was already out of her own room looking like a vacationing movie star. She had on her best jeans and a cute pink sweater—one of Clare’s “casual classy” outfits. She’d brushed out her hair and even put on fresh make-up. The speed of her transformation had to have been a new record.

  Clare hovered over Niall in the cramped kitchen as he poured hot water into three ceramic mugs and cut thin slices of cheese onto a small plate.

  “And so I just knew I had to come to Ireland, with all of its incredible history and really amazing folklore and legends, you know? When this opportunity came up to spend a year at Trinity, it was like fate or something had just reached out and picked me right out of the crowd. Right? So it was a definite no-brainer. I mean, I was like, Ireland? Are you kidding? I mean, how does regular college even compare to a year in Dublin? Sure, it took some work to get Oberlin to defer my admission for a year and I’m still trying to figure out the transfer of credits thing, but really, it’s not even close, right?”

  Niall arranged some crackers and biscuits on a second plate. Sally stood in the sitting room and wondered if she should announce herself.

  Clare appeared to no longer require oxygen. “You are just so lucky, you know? That you get to live here. All the time! That must be really phenomenally interesting, to be surrounded by so much history and so much magickal lore like every day of your whole life.”

  “It’s all right,” Niall replied without looking up.

  “So I have to ask, I mean, I haven’t gotten to talk to all that many real Irish people about Ireland since I got here. You know, because I’ve been in classes and involved in lots of other things . . .”

  “Like messing in magick without thinking,” Sally muttered before she realized she’d even opened her mouth. Clare took no notice.

  “Anyway, what I meant was, I’ve really wanted to ask someone who’s from here . . .” Clare finally took a breath, her eyes still wide with excitement. “Can you see faeries?”

  With that, Clare’s bedroom door slammed shut with a loud BOOM. Niall leapt at the sudden noise and nearly sliced into his thumb with the knife.

  “Sorry about that.” Clare squeezed Niall’s elbow. “Just our new poltergeist having some fun.”

  “Poltergeist?” Niall pulled away from Clare, and Sally stepped forward.

  “We’re really not sure what’s happening here.” Sally gestured toward the plates of cheese and crackers. “But it’s kind of you to go to all this trouble over us.”

  Niall glanced at Clare’s closed door, then turned to Sally. “It’s nothing really. Particularly since I invited myself over.”

  Sally glanced around the apartment, wondering what might go flying next. She spotted the knife on the kitchen counter.

  “Maybe staying in isn’t such a good idea right now,” she said.

  “Don’t be rude to our guest, Sally. Niall, do sit down and relax!” Clare sang brightly and stepped toward the center of the room. She winked at Niall as she sat on the small sofa and patted the cushion next to her.

  Niall carried the plates from the kitchen. Sally grabbed the trio of mugs and a handful of teabags and some packets of sweetener. Navigating over books, papers, a few half-burned candles, and several boxes of incense, Niall settled the food on the laminate coffee table and sat down in an upholstered chair. Clare pouted at being shunned on the sofa. Sally sat down beside her and rested the mugs on the table, then tossed the tea bags and brown and pink packets down as well.

  Niall nodded toward Clare’s bedroom door. “Your poltergeist?”

  “Oh, yeah!” Clare lounged back into the sofa and twirled her hair in her fingers. “I’m a witch, see, and you simply have to get used to a certain level of paranormal activity in your life when you’re dealing with invisible forces like I do.”

  Sally’s jaw tightened. “Clare.”

  “Okay,” Clare replied, deflated. She reached for one of the mugs and a tea bag. “You’re the expert.” Clare curled her fingers into air-quotes. “But you have to admit, it’s pretty exciting.”

  “No, I don’t.” Sally looked at Niall. “We’ve been having some issues here lately.”

  “I’m guessing these issues of yours are to blame for the current state of affairs in the flat?” Niall asked.

  Sally glanced around the sitting room and realized it looked like a bomb had gone off.

  Niall reached for a ceramic mug and dunked a tea bag in the hot water. Sally could see his hands were trembling. “Frankly, Sally, I wouldn’t have imagined you to be the paranormal type—”

  “Maybe your grandmother would be interested?” Clare interrupted. “You said she was at the marketplace yesterday, right?“

  “Speaking of which, do you happen to know the guy that was dressed all in black who was there yesterday?” Sally asked. “He sold Clare this feathery talisman thing made out of a butterfly wing and some other curious stuff. Show him, Clare.”

  Clare rose from the sofa and went hunting for her leather bag in the piles of debris in the room.

  “W-, what else did this particular vendor have for sale?” Niall stammered.

  “You know, some other faerie talismans, leprechaun whistles, wooden wishing charms, raven feather quills for writing,” Clare replied as she looked in the cabinets and under the sofa for her bag. “The usual stuff.”

  “I think I know the gentleman of whom you speak.” Niall emptied a packet of raw sugar into his tea.

  Clare stood up and smiled at Sally. “I just love the way he talks, don’t you?” She rested her hands on her hips. “It’s not here. Did I take my bag into my room with me?”

  “I have no idea,” Sally replied.

  Clare disappeared into her room, and sounds of opening and closing drawers soon followed.

  Sally turned to Niall. “Is something wrong?”

  “Why would you say that?” Niall raised the cup to his lips and took a tentative sip of tea. He grimaced as the beverage burned his lips.

  “There was a lady at the marketplace, in a back corner. She sold me this.” Sally lifted her hand so Niall could see her marble ring.

  “Nice piece.”

  “She was nervous about that guy in black, too,” Sally continued. “She told me to get Clare away from him.”

  Niall blew on the tea and attempted another sip. This time, he swallowed without injury.

  “That was my gran, no doubt. And the other vendor in question . . .” He glanced at Clare’s open doorway, then leaned closer to Sally and lowered his voice.

  “That was a pooka,” he said. “Kind of a mischievous being. It’s not common to encounter them, and I’ve no idea what that particular sprite might have been up to.” He looked down into his tea. “I don’t expect you to believe me.”

  “You’d be surprised what I might believe.”

  “Here it is!” Clare sang out as she strode back into the room swinging her leather satchel by its strap. “I’l
l never know how it ended up at the very back of my closet, underneath my shoes and the laundry, but there it was. Maybe it was the poltergeist!” she grinned.

  Niall and Sally exchanged a sharp look.

  Clare plopped down on the sofa beside Sally and dug into her bag for the talisman, then rested the object on the coffee table. “You can tell that guy at the marketplace that we’re on to him,” she said with a nod to Sally. “I won’t be taken in by any fake touristy stuff. A faerie charm my foot!”

  Her bedroom door slammed shut again, and the last half-dozen books still shelved in the corner bookcase crashed to the floor.

  Sally noticed the anxiety growing on Niall’s face, even as Clare clapped her hands.

  “I just knew I’d stumble into the supernatural in Ireland! Oh, Sally, I’m so glad I came!” Clare cooed. “And how lucky that we got matched up as roommates, with my own predilection for all things magickal, and with your natural talents—”

  Sally was about to interject, but Clare interrupted herself.

  “I know what we need!” Clare practically shrieked. She leapt up from the sofa and grabbed her bag. “I spied some wild silverweed sprouting by the gardener’s shed. It’ll be perfect in the tea! You know, to help us commune with the ghost of Edward Ford.”

  Clare hurried toward the door, then glanced back with a coy smile. “Now, don’t you go talking about me when I’m not here! I’ll be back in two shakes of a pooka’s tail!” She laughed and closed the door behind her. The bookcase rattled again for a moment, and then fell silent.

  “I really hope she’s not out to poison us,” Sally said.

  “She’s right about the silverweed.” Niall said. “I’ve seen the patch she’s mentioned. But if it’s spirit visions she’s after, she’ll be disappointed.”

  “So it’s not for communing with ghosts?”

  “Sore throats and upset stomachs,” Niall replied. “Also used as a diuretic.”

  Sally laughed. “Do pookas actually have tails?”