Monster Born (Northern Creatures Book 1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  I shook. How was this happening? Slowly, I lowered Arne until his feet touched the ground. “What…”

  Arne rubbed his neck. “I would kill a lesser man for such an action, jotunn,” he snarled.

  His punch hit me square on the jaw. He pulled it. I knew the moment his knuckles contacted my skin.

  I might bruise. I would swell for an hour or two. But Arne Odinsson decided not to dislocate, and for that, I should be grateful—yet all I wanted was to let out the fire. Let the rage dance across the surface of my life like gasoline on the lake. Let it burn where it had no business burning.

  Which was wrong. Wrong in angle; wrong in line and shape. Wrong for my life and wrong for Maura and Akeyla.

  Wrong for everyone.

  “Arne…” I said. “Something’s happening. The ghosts. Geometry…” I waved my hand at The Hall.

  “Get. Out,” he said. His fists clenched as if he wished to hit me again.

  “Arne…”

  “Get away from my Hall,” he barked. “And my family.”

  I backed away. I had no other choice.

  From The Hall’s entrance, Akeyla watched. Her lip quivered. Jax leaned against her on one side, and Marcus Aurelius on the other.

  Canine magic would protect my niece. Wolf and dog. Good boys, I thought, and lumbered for the real world.

  Chapter 11

  I parked my truck at the base of Rose’s Hill. My lake was two miles behind me, and Alfheim twenty, all down a barely-visible dirt track of a road.

  Dusk had settled in as I drove away from The Hall and the now-night blanketed the forest with humid, blue-black shadows. Small creatures snapped twigs. An owl hooted. Green eyes watched me from under a fallen log.

  Arne would never sell off this plot of land. No noisy, intolerable neighbors would build here. Ghosts walked between these moonlit brambles.

  I rubbed my face.

  “What is happening?” I mumbled to myself. My dog had stayed with Akeyla. My wise, wonderful Marcus Aurelius had taken it upon himself to offer the protection I could not.

  Why? Because I could not control my anger? Because it welled up still? Because I wasn’t strong enough to catch it before it grasped Arne’s neck?

  It seemed that all the meditation in the universe could not change the base nature of an unnatural monster.

  Unless….

  The rage had felt as if I’d stepped across a line. Or had been pulled. And on the other side, heat lit my spine on fire.

  Again with boundaries and borders. Again with veils and mixing.

  And fire.

  I had to do something other than destroy. I had to find answers.

  I dropped my boots to the cooling dirt. The path up the hill to Rose’s cottage was more cut-in footholds and placed rocks than an actual walk. When she had come of age, Arne had given her the high ground, perhaps for the symbolism. Or perhaps as a daily reminder that she could choose a brave path, one different than the low, dark ways of most witches.

  She’d tried. She held until the hurricanes whipped up by the Great War darkened even the magic of Alfheim.

  Murder stains all magic. Rose had been particularly sensitive to discoloration. I’d been too drunk to notice until after the fact.

  She’d gathered texts. Spells and enchantments. Amulets. Books and tomes and knowledge. Something might still be up there, in the ashes. A bone, perhaps. A talisman. A connection that would give me some type of insight.

  Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I had to do something other than destroy.

  I looked up at the hill. Could taking the notebook to the crest open its secrets? Did Rose write something on those pages that could only be seen in the presence of her ghost?

  The landscape was dotted with puzzle pieces I could not fit together. Pieces that, honestly, looked to me to be from completely different puzzles.

  But when magic was involved, there was only one puzzle. My time with Rose taught me that.

  I hopped into the bed of my truck and pulled a flashlight and Rose’s notebook out of my toolbox. I tied the notebook’s twine to my belt, then trained the beam of my flashlight onto the scruffy birch growing along the hill’s “path.” I may be strong, but giants need to see to guarantee stability. Best to be prepared.

  Her hill was west of the Mesabi Range—the Iron Range, the locals called it—the chain of mountain cores that buttressed Lake Superior. The Mesabi were what caused the elves to settle where they did. They’d had enough of carrying their boats over hills and through streams, and decided to stop before they hit the Central Plains of North America.

  I helped build Rose’s cottage at the peak of this steep hill. I helped cut in the climb to its door. I knew exactly where to look for holds among the birch, and how to get in.

  I’d been a century old the last time I stepped foot inside. Now I was two, and had my life seemingly under control. I drank coffee and tea now. I meditated as best as a man such as myself could. And I made brownies with my niece.

  Such were the stories I told myself.

  I tapped the heel of my boot on the first set stone up to the house. It held. Rocks shifted under my boots. I tucked the flashlight into my waistband and leaned into my ascent. Shadows danced, but my unnatural eyes did well in moonlight.

  But that, too, was a story. The cold, hard torch threw a beam of glare that only a mechanism of the modern world could create. I might need it, but I shouldn’t, where I was going. I walked into magic … and magic, I knew, shimmered and glowed and illuminated the night well enough.

  I used the birch along the side of the path as handholds. No birds chirped at me, nor did any animal scurry away. Even the plants seemed quieter than they should have been.

  I emerged from the bushes and birch into the clearing in front of Rose’s little house. The air changed up here—not that “up here” was more than a ten-yard climb up a steep hill. No earthen scents. No living things like the forest floor under my truck. Only rocks and faint wood ash, as if I smelled an olfactory glamour.

  The enchantment Rose had set made this small patch of land more a cold, shadowed mountain valley than a real place in Minnesota. Each sharp rock shimmered black as obsidian. Something towered over the cottage, something not here, but enchanted to be so. The air carried an unnatural warmth and the thin, clear crispness of a wind blowing down a mountain face. The moon gleamed bluer here, as well.

  But the quiet unnerved me the most. A Minnesota forest was never this quiet. Not even a mountain valley in winter was this quiet. Breezes whistled. Animals broke branches and ran tree limbs. But up here on Rose’s Hill, sound became only the tactile sense of the wind.

  Rose’s cottage waited thirty paces across the open clearing in the gray and silver moonlight, just as tended and stable as it had been the day it was built.

  It burned a century ago. It likely burned to the ground. The fire killed Rose and one of Arne’s lieutenants.

  I remembered very little through my stupor beyond the blinding glare and the volcanic heat. The fire had been a column to the sky. It kept everyone at bay. It kept me at bay. Nothing remained, so no one came up here.

  There should be no house at the top of the hill.

  Yet there it was, a log and slat cottage with shuttered windows and a pitched roof. The wood had weathered and blended into the dirt, as did the roof. But the door still hung on its frame, and the small, circular window in the roof’s front peak still held its glass.

  Was I looking at yet another ghost? “What are you?” I whispered.

  The house did not answer, nor did the wind. It sat as much in silence as Lizzy and my father and their unreal geometry, except for the smoke-like halo that lunged and lurked like vipers around the cottage’s foundations.

  The elves felt her protection enchantment. Arne once told me it stung and pricked until the elf dropped incapacitated to the ground.

  Dark, stained magic still haunted the ghost of Rose’s life.

  The fog lunged at my feet. I yipped and jumped like
a child, but it did no good. Rose’s final enchantment curled around my leg and pulled me toward the cottage.

  The door wasn’t right. Wood gripped my fingertips, and it appeared solid, but like everything else up here, it smelled only of wind and… ash.

  Ash. Blown-in soot from a fire raging two states over. The talc of a long-extinct volcano. Pyres. Old ash, the kind that had turned to dust long ago. I peered at the grain.

  The door did not simply smell of its own death, it was its own death. The fog—the ash—filled each edge, each valley in the wood, every splinter and every knot.

  Rose’s magic had made a copy of her home and when it burned, and the magic used the cinders to backfill between the lines. I stood in front of a door that was threshold-ness frozen in time and filled in with the remains of what it had once been.

  How much power did she have when she died? I’d been clueless. I’d only thought she’d lost her mind. I had no idea that she’d commanded such control. I’d watched the house burn as her magic licked and burned right along with it, but I’d never figured it out.

  Perhaps the elves hadn’t, either.

  I pushed at the door. It opened soundlessly and I stood, for the first time in a century, in the small, open, single room of Rose’s life.

  Books littered the floor. Papers lay strewn about. Tanned skins hung on the walls. Dried herbs—plants that long ago should have been as much dust as the ash that made this place—hung from the ceiling.

  The massive walk-in hearth I’d set for her still appeared functional even in its soot-phantom form of the room around it, and her black cauldron sat on its tripod under the chimney.

  It took us five years to walk the Mississippi River from Louisiana to Alfheim. I fed and clothed her along the way. Many times, I could have left her in the care of people who knew children. People who understood how to be a parent. But every night I watched her shimmer. I knew what she was. After all the death I’d inflicted during the War, I wanted to save at least one soul.

  I think Arne did, as well.

  It took forty years for her to explode. I was too drunk to see it coming. I’d effectively abandoned her to her isolation and her corrupted magic.

  I dropped to my knees in her books and her papers. Were my ghosts telling me to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to Akeyla?

  How could it? Akeyla was an elf. Her magic was pure. Unlike Rose, she wasn’t a blend of human and magical.

  But she was a blend of elf and spirit.

  Rose had been the same age when I carried her into Arne and Dag’s home and begged them to help the little witch. I claimed I knew they had the power to help her control her corrupted magic. Arne helped the werewolves. Why was helping a witch so much more difficult?

  The wolves were not chaos personified. The wolves heard only their own voices and the voices of their pack. The wolves could not open doors to Hell.

  Witches could. Some. Not many, to be honest, but the various provinces of The Land of the Dead were the easiest to access with magic.

  The dead were always close by, as my ghosts reminded me. They lived next door. All you had to do was knock on their threshold.

  And the grass is always greener on the other side, especially if you are a corrupted witch.

  Which version of Hell did Rose believe in? The frozen wasteland of the Norse gods? The Abrahamic pit of fire and brimstone? Duat, the Egyptian Land of the Dead?

  I untied her book from my belt and set it on the ash-floor. The wrap crinkled, and I minded the folds and lines. Best not to inadvertently release an unknown geometry while inside Rose’s domain.

  No words on the first page, or the second, or the third. No drawings. No lines of poetry or marks of any kind. Nothing on the cover, either. Had Rose meant to use this book, but died before she set a pen to its pages?

  I picked up the book to look at its spine.

  A pressed flower fell out.

  A big, bright, tropical bloom of white, yellow, and red, flat and thin and the size of my hand, drifted out of the book and settled onto the wrapper below.

  I’d seen flowers like this one in the bouquets sent by Akeyla’s father.

  Like the door, the flower was hell-soot. Symbols manifested on its petals—sharp corners with glass-like edges.

  “What do you say?” I asked it.

  It crumpled to dust.

  I jerked back my hand. The wrapper brightened as if it was about to burst into flame, then it, too, crumpled to dust.

  The book brightened, as did the ash-papers around it, and the next paper beyond it also crumpled.

  And the next. And the next.

  A path of hell-soot appeared before me. “Rose?” I whispered. Was she here? Was my long-dead adoptive daughter trying to tell me something?

  I cautiously followed the trail toward the steps up to the cottage’s sleeping loft. Did I dare take the stairs? Would they crumble like the paper?

  My answer came as the trail touched the bottom step.

  What had once been a wide wood loft for Rose’s bed, walls of shelves, and her one, small, round window, became pinpoints of light. Some cold, some hot. The dust of ghosts became the dust of stars, and Rose’s world became a portal.

  Was this Rose? Akeyla’s father? Or something completely different?

  Either way, I knew where that portal led.

  I reached out.

  The protection tattoos along my scalp burst outward. Curls of force, lines of power, and interlocking mandalas of magic formed a blue, green, violet Borealis barrier between me and the stardust that had once been Rose’s most private area.

  I withdrew my hand. The protection spell stayed in place. Nothing from Rose’s side could cross and do me harm; nor could I cross to find explanations.

  Unless…

  I didn’t think about what I was doing. My automatic response was to mark this magic, to add a tracer so that the elves or the wolves could come back later and perhaps make sense of what was happening—or perhaps to give myself some insight. I didn’t stop to consider that perhaps the protection spell was responding with a wall for a reason. It didn’t occur to me that the magic I carried was, in many ways, a living thing, and that like all living things, it had automatic responses to threats that a conscious mind should not ignore.

  I tossed a tracer into the protection spell’s wall. Curls retracted like recoiling anemone. Mandalas rotated like gearwork inside a lock. The tracer twisted and elongated in midair, forming an arrow of magic.

  I should have known better. My body should have known better. There was a reason I’d made it to two hundred years, and they weren’t simply the resilience of my science-built chassis. I’d made it to two hundred years because I was quick on my feet.

  The reality of life changed when that arrow of magic pierced whatever veil the protection spell had deemed so terrible that it needed to build a wall between it and me.

  I had my answer about the hell in which Rose walked. Or no answer at all, because only the living sought knowledge.

  Hel, I thought. Duet. Perhaps the Elysian Fields or one of the Circles of Hell. It did not matter. I’d just sent a tracer enchantment into The Land of the Dead.

  I only knew the tales told about those who crossed over and somehow managed to return. I’d always suspected that each story—each myth—contained a grain of truth, but that grain wasn’t what the storytellers thought it was. The stories were about the living. They were meant to teach the living lessons.

  Because the dead did not seek knowledge. The dead didn’t care.

  The dead…

  My father built me out of parts he’d stolen from the dead. He molded my flesh from clay polluted by death. Yet I walked and I sought and I obviously needed to learn a lesson.

  On the other side of the protection enchantment’s bright, shimmering wall of magic, on the side where an arrow of magic did its own seeking, on the side that did not care, something scooped up my tracer enchantment.

  Ghosts were reflections of the g
eometry of a life’s moment. Often, they repeated traumas. But like the myths of heroes who had returned from The Land of the Dead, a ghost’s purpose was to educate the living.

  I’d been seeing ghosts. More importantly, I’d been feeling the intrusions of the ghosts of my own rage, of my body’s tensions and heat. My moment before meeting with Dag, and my unwarranted response to Arne, had been proof that I lived, even if that proof caused more harm than good.

  On the other side, the tracer locked onto the mirror reflection of my proof of living. Yes, it raged, but not in a living way. It roiled like decay. It boiled with malignance. It responded only because it was driven to do so, but it did not care.

  I gagged and staggered backward. Gagged and choked and wrapped my hands around my throat to protect the force that kept me alive—the blood pushed by my beating heart.

  Rose understood malignance. Rose had spent decades fighting her own. She’d gone into The Land of the Dead still fighting, and even though she no longer cared, a reflection of her traumatic events still lingered on this side. Still fought and still offered a lesson to anyone capable of seeing the ghosts.

  Rose had sent me Lizzy. She’d wanted me to remember that I could grow and change. That I was alive.

  She’d sent me the ghost of my father to remind me that I was also dead.

  I stumbled. My feet betrayed me and I crashed into the magic holding the dust of her cottage’s door inside its ghost.

  My protection enchantment’s wall popped like a bubble.

  The vision of the volcanic mountainside vanished. The cottage ruptured and also vanished. I lay face up on top of a leaf-strewn Minnesota forest floor, still gagging, staring at a wavering moon about to burst into fullness.

  The only reality left at the top of Rose’s Hill was my heaving body.

  I knew what was happening. I understood what had crawled below Alfheim’s magic under the cover of night.

  A raven cawed. Something scurried next to my head. A bark echoed through the trees.

  “Marcus Aurelius?” I coughed just as the blackness took my consciousness.