“Oh!” I exaggerated for Akeyla. “Are we making dessert tonight?”
You learn a lot about the world when you live with elves. Useful knowledge drips off them like honeydew—sweet, addictive, and sticky as hell. Once you’ve learned a way from an elf, there’s no turning back.
Especially when it came to making brownies. Not the “squat little hobgoblin” kind. The close-to-godliness, fudge kind.
“Yep!” Akeyla kissed my cheek.
I knew they’d be moving out soon, but I had to admit I liked having them here.
“So we have to use Dutch process cocoa? That’s the rule?” I asked.
My young supervisor scrunched up her eight-year-old face as I set her down next to the kitchen counter.
Her crunched-up lips released into a big grin and her magic danced around her little body. She wisped her delicate hand through the air. “Duh, Uncle Frank.” She rolled her eyes. “Otherwise the magic won’t work.”
With elves, rules equal magic, and magic equals sweet, addictive, sticky brownies.
“Oh,” I said, and nodded once as if I’d finally learned the true meaning of life.
Akeyla patted my arm. “That’s okay. Mommy says you’re super smart.” She said it in a way that made me think the jury was still out on my smartness.
By the refrigerator, Maura covered a snort by pretending to cough.
I leaned down as if to share with Akeyla a secret of great importance. “It’s not the smarts that make me super,” I said. “It’s little elf hugs!”
I scooped her up off her stool and twirled her high up over my head. She screeched as only an eight-year-old can—an unearthly loud, high-pitched, kid-giggle—and stuck her arms out at her sides.
“I’m flying!” She screeched again.
At my almost seven foot height and with a reach and speed that were significantly more “super” than my smarts, I pretty much did have her flying.
Her elemental fire magic licked at the ceiling as dancing, barely visible, red and blue pseudo-flames. They carried heat, but not the chaotic release of energy that came with a blaze. The heat of a fire elf touched souls.
Akeyla Maurasdottir would one day be an elf worthy of both adoration and terror.
Maura’s cell phone rang. “Hello?” she said.
I twirled Akeyla again, then used her to do a couple one-armed press-ups.
That got the giggles going.
Maura frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “No, no, Sam.” She sighed. “I do trust your judgement to pick the best place, but I need to check them.”
Samantha Nelson, the mundane owner of Alfheim’s Nelson Florals. A call from Sam meant that Akeyla’s father had sent yet another bouquet. He was, as Maura’s mother said, “creepily persistent.”
Maura had left Alfheim for Hawaii about a decade ago, but came home with Akeyla two months ago. Her ex did a number on her—the bruising of her magic. The sparking where there should have been silk-like sheets.
This morning’s flickering.
Sam didn’t understand why Maura or Dag needed to check the card and the flowers before she sent the arrangements on to the hospital or the schools. She wasn’t one of the handful of mundanes in town who knew about magic.
But the card, message, and flowers needed to be checked. Sometimes magic could be “creepily persistent” even if the spell used Sam’s own flowers.
I watched the lovely child giggling and flying over my head. “I’m going to have to put you down, pumpkin,” I said. The continued bad behavior of Maura’s ex took precedent.
Akeyla scowled and purposefully arched her back like an ice skater in the middle of a lift. I flipped her onto my shoulders. “Watch your head.” I bounced her around the kitchen.
“Looks like we’re leaving for school early today.” Maura held up her phone. “I need to check on this.”
I nodded and set Akeyla down. “Sure thing.”
“Mom!” Akeyla pouted and stomped her foot. “We don’t need to leave for school for another fifteen minutes.”
Maura squatted down to her daughter’s level. “I know, honey. But we need to go so I can check in with Sam.” She looked up at me.
I squatted down, too. “Tell you what. We’ll go fishing tomorrow.”
Akeyla bounced. “Can we take Marcus Aurelius?”
My dog nuzzled her hand.
“Of course we can,” I said.
She bounced on her toes. “All right!” She grabbed her lunch off the counter. “Bye, Uncle Frank!”
And after one final hug, I sent my elven sister and niece off to town.
Chapter 3
I watched Maura’s sedan pull away as she and Akeyla made their way down my gravel driveway. Maura would drop Akeyla at school, then make her way to Nelson’s Floral. I’d spend my day alone with my noisy neighbors.
Marcus Aurelius padded over and sat his big hound backside next to my foot. The werewolves liked Marcus Aurelius, and Gerard and Remy often asked to borrow him to comfort the occasional, also-rescued, new pack member. Times like this, I understood why.
My dear dog wagged his tail.
“You want to go for a ride, don’t you?” I looked back at the house. I was low on both coffee and tea, as well as paper towels, and should probably pick up a fresh bag of Akeyla-friendly apples.
My canine emperor barked.
Across the lake, someone yelled. Another boom followed.
I should also stop at The Great Hall and speak to Arne or Dag. Ask them about the recent uptick in new building permits.
“Perhaps they will do me the courtesy of a consultation before selling the next lot, huh, boy?” I said.
Marcus Aurelius barked again.
The noise of the construction tapered off as I made my way across the clover and acorns toward the garage. The canopy of Lizzy’s oak towered over the smaller, younger birch and aspen around the house. The garage was also tucked between two other large oaks. Squirrels chirped and birds sang. I watched my footing as I always did, so I didn’t poke my foot on a particularly hard nut, or roll my ankle on a hidden rock.
Two hundred years of remade life, and to this day, I still sometimes fumbled or missed a mark. Two hundred years of life with elegant and graceful elves and yet I continued to lumber on legs that were not truly my own.
Daily practice helped. I painted for a while, then briefly took up the violin. Target practice with a bow or a rifle came easier, and I was now a decent shot. But dancing never happened, and even though I can handle a sewing machine, I’ve always had to rely on the elves for tailoring.
Fine or gross motor skills, neither have ever matched the speed or strength my maker baked into my piecemeal body.
A crow cawed close by, but from which tree my piecemeal senses did not tell me.
The brambles moved.
There, hidden in the shadows among the stand behind the garage, were a white snout and two distinctive black-rimmed bright-blue hound eyes.
Sled dog eyes. Lizzy’s eyes.
“Marcus Aurelius,” I said, “do you see her?”
Lizzy ducked her head. The blue of her eyes flickered and trailed through the shadows as if she pulled a hot flame behind her.
My living hound whined and cocked his head as if listening. He obviously did not smell our visitor, nor, it seemed, did he see or sense her in any way.
Yet she watched me. “Lizzy?” I called.
She vanished into the shadows. The brambles rustled, and the branch swayed as she pulled back her head.
My Lizzy was not a phantom.
“Come, girl!” I yelled. How was this possible?
I lived among elves. I was familiar with magic. I’d come face-to-face with ghosts and spirits many times in my long life. I’d witnessed the making of many and the culling of more. I understood what they were and how they came about.
But this apparition was unlike any I’d seen before.
I quickly rolled up my sleeve. Magic and I have an understanding—I let it be and it doesn’t explode
in my creature-of-science face—but it was kind enough to allow me to wield enchantments gifted by others.
The tracers tattooed on my forearm shimmered blue-violet and green. I flipped my arm out, and pointed.
Nothing. A tracer lifted off my scarred inner arm and danced as a prismatic heat mirage above my skin, but it did not follow. It, like Marcus Aurelius, sensed nothing that needed following.
I looked back at the bramble. It had moved. I saw it move. Perhaps a squirrel? But Marcus Aurelius chased every squirrel that dared to set foot in the clover.
I knew what I saw. It may have been two centuries, but I knew my Lizzy—even if her eyes had flickered like flame.
I also knew what time of the year it was. The veil always thinned around Samhain, even a full moon beforehand. Thinned and let through spells and phantoms.
Here I stood, the semi-corpse jotunn able to see magic. I saw the workings of the tracer enchantments on my arms, and the protection marks along the side of my scalp when they lifted off my body to do their work. The marks that, more than anything else, told the magicals of the world that I was under the protection of the elves of New World Alfheim.
But Lizzy felt different—looked different. How, I could not quite say. More solid? Less solid? She left no traces of any real magic. No shimmers on the brambles, or a good fright in the gut of my living dog.
Perhaps I imagined her. Perhaps the true magic here was my mind making a representation of my life before the intrusion of intolerable neighbors.
Or maybe this was magic I did not know. New magic. Perhaps the magic of creepily persistent spells of creepy exes? “Come, my emperor,” I said. I needed to know. “Time to see an elf about a dog, huh?”
My living hound barked reassuringly and followed me to the truck.
Time to visit the Elf King of Alfheim, Arne Odinsson.
Chapter 4
Alfheim proper covered about fifteen square miles of territory, with commercial and retail districts spilling out along the highway. One or two squat apartment buildings hid in the trees along the side roads. The state-run community college sat on a hill north of the city. But mostly the town stayed confined to its ancestral lands.
Except the old Ramsey Mansion. No one knew why the family who once owned the land named the manor after Minnesota’s First Territorial Governor, Alexander Ramsey—Alfheim was too far north for the Ramsey family to have cared during Minnesota’s formative years. But by the time I returned from the Civil War, the massive stone mansion had been built on yet another hill overlooking the elves’ lands. The mundanes responsible abandoned it shortly thereafter.
Now the Ramsey Mansion was a tourist attraction on the way into town. It was also Alfheim’s one and only branch library—and home to the town’s two vampires, Tony and Ivan Biterson.
Their names weren’t really Tony and Ivan, and they most certainly were not born as Bitersons. The elves can be a bit… sarcastic, and I’d long suspected that the name was one of Arne’s many ways of keeping the two vampires under his control.
Tony and Ivan were as different as night and day, but both seemed inclined to behave themselves. Rumor was that they had both been Russian Cold War spies—which I did not believe for one second. But Arne had found the claim entertaining and had given them a job when they first showed up in the fifties. One they enjoyed. They sorted and organized the less-than-savory papers left behind by Alfheim’s one and only witch, Rose.
Not many individuals could touch her darker notebooks and artifacts. A few of the elves could, but witch magic corrupted, and no one deemed Rose a witch of enough note to make the risk of corruption worthwhile. I could, but Arne long ago decided that he would not inflict such a painful trauma onto me.
Rose’s death had been hard enough.
The Ramsey Mansion was just off the highway on the way into town. I could stop. Ask Tony or Ivan if Alfheim’s Special Collection held any scraps about fire spirits and ghosts. Rose horded everything—bones, bedlam, spells and enchantments—so I might not be grasping at straws.
Or perhaps one of the vampires had insight. Not that I would share my moment with Lizzy with a vampire. They sucked on more than just blood; they also sucked away energy and information.
Tony and Ivan might have been the nicest, sweetest, most lovingly-tough Russian spies to ever walk a dark Moscow night while they were alive, but they were effectively dual personalities now. In those undead bodies lived both the intelligent men of mystery and their psychotic killer shadow-selves.
I parked my truck under a tree in the small lot cut into the side of the hill below the mansion. I patted Marcus Aurelius’s head as I fully rolled down all the windows. He’d have a good cross breeze and could jump out if he needed to. “Watch the truck,” I said.
He thumped his tail on the seat and laid down his head. He’d snooze while I chatted with our blood-sucking neighbors.
Sunlight sliced into the lobby as I swung open the doors. It arched across the tile toward the eight inlaid lines: each solstice and equinox, plus the four seasonal midpoints, Samhain included.
The lines served to educate the children of Alfheim’s mundane population. For Tony and Ivan, they were the outer edges of their daylight cage.
The entire foyer and ballroom of the mansion had been stripped out, opened up, and filled with shadow-producing book racks. Tall, high, shaded windows allowed in indirect sunlight for the patrons, most of which fell on the children’s play area. It also formed a shadowed trail through the daylight for Tony and Ivan.
The huge round librarian desk sat in the center front of the room just off the door-edge of their sunlight cage. A decorative roof of Norse-inspired scrollwork sheltered the desk from the windows.
A massive bouquet full of tropical flowers sat to one side. Maura hadn’t said anything about donating to the libraries, but that didn’t mean Sam wasn’t sending the flowers over.
I stared at the damned thing for a long moment, until Tony cleared his throat.
Tony sat behind the desk, his feet propped up and his phone in his hand. He wore one of his many Alfheim County Library t-shirts, this one a dusty deep red that added a rosy tint to his too-alabaster skin and a hint of fire to his glossy, almost-Medusa-like curls.
In life, Tony Biterson had been a sweet-looking twenty-something with strong-if-young features, warm, honey-colored eyes, a straight nose, and a wide, charming smile. He stood nose-to-nose with Arne, which put him over six feet, and he carried himself well with wide shoulders and a slim, athletic build.
Now, he worked the con favored by the modern undead: the handsome-if-scary boyfriend with a semi-criminal side who needed a good taming. Being a librarian added a dash of nerd. Tony played the part well.
Tony looked up as I walked toward the desk. The blue light from his phone screen caught in his preternatural eyes, and for a split second they shimmered as if infested with magic.
Then he grinned.
Elves, when angry and out of their glamour, can be terrifying, but even Arne’s ire paled in comparison to the shiver Tony generated. Inside that loveliness and behind that handsome face beat no heart. Blood circulated only by the sheer will of the vampire’s addiction to stealing more. Muscles moved, but in a shadowy, slippery way.
Like his skin, his teeth were too bright and too alabaster. Too clean. Too predatory.
Tony dropped his feet off his desk. “What can I do you for today, Mr. Victorsson?” He tucked his phone into the back pocket of his jeans. “Got some good odds on the Gopher football game tonight, if you’re interested.”
Tony and Ivan ran the Ramsey library branch. They also ran bets. And the extra special accounts of some of the local shipping businesses. Arne let them because, he said, “A little naughtiness helps them keep their larger evils under control.”
“Not today,” I said.
Tony walked over to the customer counter. He ran his hand over one of the bouquet’s oversized red blossoms, then sniffed a smaller, yellow orchid. “Donated,” he sai
d. “Nice, aren’t they?”
“Quite,” I said.
Tony signed into the computer. “Got a handful of new bodice-rippers in yesterday.” He pointed over his shoulder. “Looks like a few of them haven’t been checked out yet.”
He grinned again.
“Enough, Tony,” I growled.
The grin vanished. “You’re not going to break a window and finish me off, are you?” He batted his lovely eyelashes.
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or continuing his smart-ass ways.
“Again,” I said, “not today.”
His eyebrows arched. “Good, good.” Then he tapped absently at his keyboard. “Then I’ll assume you’re here because you’re looking to enjoy an afternoon amongst the Rare Collections?”
“Yes,” I said.
Tony shrugged. “Ivan’s down there now.”
Of course Ivan was in the basement with the witch papers. Ivan was Tony’s opposite—short, squat, and troll-like—which was why Tony did most of the human meet-and-greet.
I turned toward the back stairwell.
“Mr. Victorsson,” Tony called.
He stood perfectly still behind the librarian desk, a might-be ex-Russian spy who ran bets and sucked the blood of the innocent. “Samhain’s coming,” he said, then slid back into the shadows.
Chapter 5
No natural light filtered into the Ramsey House basement. What windows had been built into the mansion had been shuttered with steel casings for “environmental control,” and unless they had an inspection, Ivan and Tony preferred candles to overhead fluorescents or halogens.
A front antechamber at the base of the stairs showcased several of the House’s Victorian features, including the boiler and the massive, wood-fired stove. The house even had a cheese cave.
Behind the tourists’ room, a modern mechanical room housed the gas furnace, water supply, and access to the duct work.
The Rare Collections room was hidden behind a wall of wires and ducts, half of which were non-functional and there only to confuse mundanes. I ducked under a pipe and twisted so I could wiggle behind the furnace, and scrunched down to pass through the low, claustrophobic door.
Monster Born (Northern Creatures Book 1) Page 2
