Authors: Katharine Kerr
When I came home, I turned into the driveway as usual. I stopped the car, killed the
engine, and stared. The garage door stood open, and inside sat a beautiful blue
sedan. I got out of my old heap and walked up to the car, a German make, one of
the really expensive ones. I glanced inside: leather upholstery in a deep-dyed
tan. When I ran my fingers along the hood, the paint job felt like fine enamel,
as smooth and rich as you'd find on jewelry.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me. I turned around to see Tor, grinning as he
held out a set of keys.
“The title's going to be in your name,” he said. “I've already called about the
insurance.”
Lord Bountiful. Cynthia had nailed it.
“Tor.” I could barely speak. “I can't take this from you.”
“Of course you can, because I want to give it to you.” He hesitated, and the grin
disappeared. “Don't you like it?”
“I love it, but, god, it must be so expensive.”
“It's also the best engineered sedan on the market. It'll keep you safe. Me, too, if I
happen to be in it ifâ” He paused for emphasis. “If we have another incident
like we did Saturday night. Steel frame. Top of the line air bags, front and
side. All that good stuff.”
When he held out the keys again, I took them. A gadget hung from the ring that would
open or lock the doors, make the car beep if I lost it in a parking lot, turn
on its lights from a distance, do just about everything but phone home. Tor
opened the car door and began pointing out all the other gadgets and sensors on
the inlaid wood dashboard. Now and then he paused to run his hand over the
upholstery or to stroke the glossy paint job.
I realized that although the car would legally be mine, he'd gotten it for himself, too, an
expensive toy that he couldn't have justified otherwise. Because he loved it so
much, I could accept it.
“We should donate that old car of yours to charity,” Tor said. “They'll probably get fifty
bucks at the junkyard.”
“No,” I said. “Can't we keep it? It's a two-car garage.”
He tilted his head to one side and gave me his puzzled-bear look.
“I'll need to drive it to school.”
“Why?”
“The paint on my clothes. I'd hate to mess up that gorgeous leather.”
Tor laughed. “Ever hear of seat covers? We can get some cheap ones. Terry cloth.
You can throw them out when they get filthy.”
“Okay, yeah, that would work.”
The Chevy seemed to be staring at me reproachfully, as if it wanted to live, not end up
squashed in a junkyard.
“I still want to keep the old one,” I said. “I bought it with my own money. My first
car. I hate the thought of junking it. It's like a pet.”
Tor rolled his eyes. “Oh okay,” he said. “Whatever.”
I got back into my old car and drove it into the garage, next to the shiny new one. I wanted to keep the Chevy just in case, I realizedâjust in case he found out about my disease. I'd need to leave in a hurry, and I wouldn't want to take his generosity with me. As I was getting out of the car, Tor trotted into the garage.
“How are you feeling today?” he said. “Do you need to take a nap or something?”
"No, I feel better. Whatever you did with that rune really worked."
“Well, then.” He paused to grin. “Let's go for a drive.”
“Okay, but there's a couple of things I have to do first.”
“What?”
“Here's one.” I reached up and kissed him. “Thank you,” I said. “It's a super-sweet ride. Thank you so much! I really really love it.”
He slipped his arms around me and gave me a hug. He was grinning, so pleased and proud, so normal and happy that I hated my thoughts like this most recent one: keep the old car, just in case. Leaving him would be painful.
“And now I've got to change my clothes,” I continued. “My jeans have globs of paint on
them. It's acrylic, but it might not be totally dry.”
“Okay, while you do that, I'm going to get some olive oil and paint runes on her
bumpers. For the protection.” He tilted his head to one side and considered me
with a small smile. “What about a name?”
“How about Gretel? Like in the fairy tales.”
“Sure. That'll do. She is German, after all.”
When we took Gretel out, I drove her first. Since the engine wasn't broken in yet, we
stuck to the streets and back roads rather than the freeways. Eventually we hit
the curving roads that led through the Oakland hills. I'd never driven anything
that handled so well, so smoothly, as if the car were doing half the thinking
for me. Tor watched all the digital read-outs on the dashboard as avidly as a
co-pilot on an airplane.
When we reached a view turn-out on a wide road, I took pity on him. I pulled over and
turned in my seat to grin at him.
“Want to drive?” I said.
“Well, if you don't mind.” Tor looked as eager as a small boy who's just been offered ice
cream. “I mean, it's your car.”
“I want you to see how wonderful it is.”
He smiled, leaned over, and kissed meâjust once. He wanted to get his hands on that wheel.
Tor decided to head back down to the city to see how Gretel handled in stop-and-go traffic.
As we came down from the hills, I noticed in the side mirror another car
following us, a black dot on the blacktopped road. At first the car stayed too
far away for me to identify. It could have been anyone, I reminded myself. For
some miles, however, it kept to the same distance.
“Tor?” I said. “Slow down, okay?”
 Gretel responded so smoothly that I might not have known he'd done soâexcept that the other
car abruptly got a lot closer. I stared into the mirror and caught sight of the
black SUV before he too slowed down.
“He's back,” I said. “We have our friend on our tail.”
“Shit!” Tor muttered. “Ruining a perfectly good day.”
He drove a little faster. The tail sped up but kept a good distance between usâabout a
city block's worth. By then we'd reached the streets of a quiet residential
district, bungalows and brown-shingled houses behind small lawns. When Tor
stopped at a stop sign, the SUV turned into a driveway rather than come up
directly behind us. When Tor started up again, the SUV pulled out and followed,
still at that long distance.
“We could try going downtown,” I said. “The traffic will fill in behind us and cut him
off.”
“I've got a better idea.”
When we reached the next cross-street, Tor pulled over and parked. The SUV did the same
thing down at the other end of the block. Tor began unbuckling his seat belt.
“What are you doing?” I said. “You can't get out of the car! What if he tries to hit you?”
“Too many witnesses around here. He wouldn't dare.”
I grabbed him by the arm. “If he's crazy, that won't stop him.”
“No, but the power of the runes will.”
Before I could protest further, Tor shook my hand off his arm, opened the door, and got
out. He shut the door again, then turned to look down the block toward the SUV.
“Nils!” He was yelling at the top of his lungs. “Come on, come talk to me!” He switched
into Icelandic and yelled something else, then went back to English. “Tell me
what's so wrong! Let's have it out!”
I sat paralyzed. I remembered Tor calling himself a barbarian at heart. I was seeing
it in the way he stood, warrior-straight, his head tipped a little back, his
hands on his hips, daring his enemy to come forward and either bargain or
fight. In the bay window of a nearby house, curtains twitched, and the shadowy
form of a woman looked out. I was praying she'd call the policeâjust in case. I
had my phone in my backpack, but I knew Tor would be furious if I called.
Out in the street, Tor fell silent, panting a little for breath. I returned to keeping
watch on the SUV in the rearview mirror. The black hulk pulled away from the
curb but hesitated out in the middle of the street.
“Come on, Nils!” Tor yelled. “Are you afraid to talk to me?”
The SUV sped forward with a grind of gears. I screamed and covered my mouth with both
hands. The huge car lumbered down the street fast, too fast. It swerved toward
us. Tor never moved. At the last second the SUV swerved back to the middle of
the street. It sped past Tor and lurched around the corner. I could hear the
engine roaring through the quiet neighborhood, then slowly fading, dying away
into the distance.
Tor flung open the car door. “Fucking coward!” he said. “That had to be Nils, all right.
He looks a lot like my dad.”
I caught my breath with a gulp.
“What's wrong?” Tor said. “You look scared.”
“Of course I was scared, you idiot! What if he'd sideswiped you?”
“Oh.” Tor slid back in behind the wheel. “Yeah, that would have messed up your new car.”
“It's not the car I was worried about.”
“I know.” He smiled. “A joke. Do you have a sketchbook in your backpack?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I got a good look at the license plate. I want to write it down in case I forget. Maybe
we can trace it. He'll try to confront me again. This was just the first step.”
“First step of what?”
“Breaking him down.” Tor gave me a totally out of place grin. “He could have killed me.
But he backed off. I figured he would, and because I was right, he lostâwell, I
don't know what to call it. He lost status, I guess. Or lost face. Something
like that.”
I kept a constant look-out while he drove us home, but the SUV never appeared. None of
the other cars that at times might have been following us turned into it,
either, when I tried to puncture possible illusions. Tor said little until we
reached the house. He let me out at the sidewalk, then parked Gretel and shut
up the garage for the night. As he walked back to join me he was jingling the
keys in his hand.
“I've made up my mind,” he said. “I'm going to figure out a way to challenge him. It's
stupid, sitting around waiting for his next move.”
I wanted to scream. Instead I said, and pretty calmly considering the circumstances, “You
mean to a duel or a fight?”
“No, no, just to see if he'll come forward and talk. Iâ” He stopped and looked away.
“What's wrong?”
“You just gave me an idea. Let me think about this.”
He strode off, and I followed him into the house.
Since we'd turned off the air conditioning before we left, the summer heat had toasted the
inside of the flat. We turned it on again, but it would take an hour or so to
cool the place down. Tor put together a cold dinner in a picnic basket, I
grabbed one of the old blankets, and we went outside to eat in the cool of the
evening.
The landscaping out in back of the house was as uninspired as the front, a big
rectangle of grass, dotted here and there with dandelions and other weeds. Off
to one side stood a Japanese maple that badly need pruning. Since the house
stood on a terraced hillside, a stone retaining wall, about six feet high,
edged the rear of the lawn to keep back the hill. Beyond the wall, the property
sloped up in a profusion of scrawny trees and shrubs to the neighbor's house a
good long ways above.
“One of these days,” Tor said, “I should hire a landscaper, I guess. Unless you like to
garden.”
“I don't know anything about it,” I said. “I grew up in apartments.”
I spread out the blanket, and we sat down in the beautifully cool air. Tor opened the
basket and brought out a bottle of white wine and two glasses. I poured while
he set out the food. The sky had turned the velvet blue of approaching
twilight. I saw off to the east two bright stars. The fluttering gold lights of
an airplane climbed slowly between them as if they were beacons marking a safe
road. Above us on the slope the trees rustled in a rising breeze.
“This is actually kind of fun,” I said.
“Yeah, we should do it more often, these hot days. We could even get a picnic table.”
For a while we ate in a pleasant shared silence. A few flies tried to crash the party, of
course, but when Tor snapped a napkin at them, they kept their distance instead
of coming right back as flies usually did. Magic, I wondered? I would have felt
foolish asking him outright. Tor poured us each a second glass of wine and
brought out fresh pears for dessert.
“I've been thinking about Nils,” he said. “The idea you gave me when you talked about a
duel. I wonder if he was Björn, back then.”
“Back when?”
“When you were married to him. Björn, I mean, not Nils per se. In Copenhagen.”
“Oh. That.” I had a swallow of wine. “Do we have to talk about it?”
“Yes.” Tor looked at me with puzzled eyes. “It could be important. Look, that day he
followed you around at the mall. He told you that you had to recognize him,
right?”
“Right. Oh god, I never even thought much about it!”
“That's because you didn't know about us then. Huh.” He thought for a couple of
minutes. “You might be one of the things he wants to take from me. Not that
you're a thing, not to me, anyway. He might see you as some kind of object he
wants back.”
“I understand, yeah. Ohmigawd, the thought makes me feel sick.”
“It makes me furious. Do you remember why you married him?”
I started to snap at him, but I did remember, or at least, a story came to me as fast as
a memory would have. I had a long swallow of wine before I said, “My father
sold me to him when my mother died. I was fourteen. Björn didn't have to marry
me, really. I guess it was decent of him.”
Tor started to speak, merely stared.
“Well, gypsies didn't have any legal rights or anything, did they?” I said. “Way back
then.”
“No. Shit, I didn't remember that part. About you being sold, I mean.”
I finished the wine in my glass and reached for the bottle.
“Do you remember Björn's last name?” Tor said. “Details like that?”
“No.” I concentrated on refilling my glass. “I don't want to.”
“I don't remember a lot of them myself. Your name, his name. Then there was your maid.
We had to bribe her. I don't remember her name, but she was a skinny little rat
of a girl. The cook was on your side, though. Elsa, her name was.”
He paused for a sip of wine. I realized that he believed his story about the past life
and his death, just as I believed I remembered the look on Björn's face when he
returned from the duel. And the drowning. I knew I remembered that. I no longer
felt like eating anything. I put the wine bottle back into the basket. Tor put
his glass down, picked up a pear, and bit into it. He swallowed, then glared at
the traumatized pear in his hand.
“These could be riper,” he said. “A thought. Those protection runes? You could get
them tattooed somewhere on you. You wouldn't have to worry about wearing
amulets then. I could put together new bindrunes, too, if you wanted a
different pattern.”
Bindrune. The word bothered me. Would he bind me to him with magic, just as Björn had bound
me with guilt and terror? I realized that I remembered more than I wanted to
about my marriage after the duel.
“Needles freak me out,” I said. “No tattoos. Yuck! I'd be sick the whole time the guy
was doing it.”
“It was just a thought. When you go out, what about I draw them on you, like I did for
the cramps?”
“But the inkâisn't it going to be toxic?”
“I can get some of that stuff clowns use to paint children's faces. It should be perfectly
safe. You might need a more powerful bindrune if Björn isâ”
“I don't want to talk about him any more.”
“We'll have to sooner or later.”
“Not now!”
“Okay, okay.” He looked mildly surprised. “What did you want to do tonight? We could
go to a movie or something.”
The calm normal way he offered a night out, coming right after his talk of past lives,
made me want to scream at him. Instead I just said, “No thanks. I'm really
tired. I'm still bleeding.”
“Maybe later in the week, then. I need to go down to my workshop and cast the staves,
anyway.”
“Workshop? Oh, the lower flat.”
“Yeah. It'll take me a couple of hours, probably, to do all the things I have in mind.
I've got to email a college buddy of mine. He's a total hacker, and I bet he
can trace that license number I wrote down.”
While Tor worked downstairs, I took my laptop into my room. I found my earbud, then
logged on and watched clips from really dumb TV shows on YouTube. I felt like a
rebellious child, but I enjoyed the clips anyway. When I heard Tor coming back
upstairs, I logged off. I was just returning the laptop to my backpack when Tor
appeared in the doorway.
“I heard from Aaron,” he said. “My hacker friend, y'know? He tried to find data about
Nils for me. He couldn't. He can break into the blocked phonebooks without much
effort, but there was nothing on the name Nils Halversson. He must have set up
a false name and identity a long time ago. Probably to get money out of the
country into a Swiss bank or one of those tax-shelter islands in the Caribbean.”
“Oh god! We're back to square one.”
“Yeah, we sure are. Now, as for the SUV, Aaron found that license plate number on the DMV
site. The plates were stolen from a car in the airport parking garage a week
ago. So they're not going to tell us anything about Nils, either.”
“That's a real cold shot.”
“Yeah, isn't it?” Tor paused, thinking, then shrugged. “I don't know what to do.”
“Can't we tell the police about the plates?”
“Not without telling them how we know. I don't want Aaron arrested.”
“I can understand that. He's an old friend, huh?”
“The oldest one I have. We were college buddies. We still get together, go to Raiders games
with a couple other guys. Sometimes we all goof around playing basketball, too.”
He tilted his head to one side to consider me. “Do you like football, by the
way?”
“I like to watch it on TV. But you can go to games without me. I mean, you should get to
spend time with your guy friends.”
“You won't mind?” He raised one eyebrow.
“Of course not!”
“Okay. I always end up missing a game or two, anyway, thanks to the damn bjarki, but we
get season tickets for the Black Hole. You probably wouldn't like sitting
there. It's kind of a rowdy crowd.”
“I've seen them on TV. If you went in bjarki form I bet no one would notice.”
He laughed at that. “We were some of the weird guys, back at Cal. Freaks and geeks. You
never would have gone out with any of us, if you'd known us then.”
“Maybe with you. Maybe. You clean up pretty good.”
He grinned and agreed.
We spent the evening reading in the living room, Tor with one of his books on magic, me
with the pile of Icelandic sagas he'd given me, stories of kings and treachery
and evil sorcerers from the Hebridesâgood stories, all right. One thread ran
through them that I didn't really get. At one point I looked up to see Tor
laying his book aside.
“Want something to drink?” he said. “I think I'll get myself a beer. I've read all I
can tonight of this heavy stuff.”
“None for me, thanks. Can I ask you something? In these sagas, the men are always talking
about their honor and killing people over it. Why? I don't get it.”
“It's a shame culture, that's why. Once a man is shamed, he's less of a man. And that's
the worst thing, to give up your manhood.”
“But the way they define manhood creeps me out.”
“It's a real archaic way of thinking, yeah.” Tor got up from the couch and stretched. “But
it hasn't disappeared.”
“That's sure true. That's what Nils lost today, isn't it? Honor points.”
“It's not exactly a point system. But yeah, you're right enough.”
I frowned at the copy of Njall's saga in my lap. “All of these guys pride themselves on
facing death and being super brave, but they're terrified of being shamed.”
“You bet. You can't kill shame with a sword. That's what makes it so frightening.”
I supposed so, and Tor went into the kitchen to fetch his beer.
Around two in the morning I had a nightmare. I was standing on the high wooden bridge in
the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. As I looked down into the little
stream that runs underneath it, a creature rose up, formed of mud and slime.
Huge, and shaped like a manâit reached for me with fingers dripping green rot.
I stood transfixed as it grabbed my ankles and yanked me off the bridge. The
water beneath spread and swelled to a deep dark pool that reached for me with
green fingers. I screamed and screamed again. The water churned with waves and
tossed me this way and that.
“Maya! Maya, wake up!”
I opened my eyes and stopped screaming. A light went on in the bedroom. I was curled up so
tightly that my arms ached. A naked man with sandy brown hair and a dimple at
one corner of his mouth knelt beside me on the bed.
Tor. It took me a few seconds to recognize him.
“You were thrashing around,” he said. “What was the dream?”
“I was drowning. Again.”
I stretched out on my back and felt my pounding heart slowly return to normal. He lay back
down and turned on his side to look at me.
“A memory dream?” he said.
“No. There was a monster involved.” I forced out a smile. “And a black hole. Symbolic
stuff everywhere. Was I screaming?”
“Oh yeah.” He leaned over and laid his hand alongside my face. “Sort of a weird muffled
scream, but I could hear it, all right.”
His touch, his concern, comforted me. He kissed my mouth, the side of my face, my
forehead.
“Can you go back to sleep?” he said. “Are you okay now?”
“Yeah, because you're here.”
He smiled with a glowing, pure pleasure as if I'd given him the best present in the
world. “Yeah, I'm right here,” he said. “And I always will be.”
At that moment his words soothed me further, but as I lay awake, they began to bother
me. He was assuming that we'd stay together forever, or if not forever, at
least for some long time. Why wouldn't I want to stay? He was kind, sexy,
generous to a fault, supportive when it came to my art. Yet he frightened me at
moments. With his sorcery Tor seemed like a man from another world, an alien
world. He brought strange experiences with him, memories of past lives,
sorcerous enemies, hints of dark things hiding in my own mind.
Like the talent to speak in an ancient language, one I didn't know, didn't even
recognize. That alien world could be mine, too, if I had the guts to travel
there. The thought made me shiver and squirm. I realized that night, as I lay
next to him, that I was afraid of myself, not of Tor.
I did feel guilty about lying to him. I'd never told him about my disease, and that night
I questioned my motives. I found myself remembering that seriously
old-fashioned term for girls who took guys for expensive gifts: gold-digger.
Did it come down to that, after my working so hard to take care of myself and
earn my own way? The beautiful flat, a fancy carâI was willing to bet that if I
asked him to buy me expensive clothes and jewelry, he would. Fortunately for
his cash flow, I'd never do such a thing.
I decided that I was going to have to tell him the truth. I promised myself that I'd do
it first thing in the morning, but I never quite got the chance in my hurry to
leave for class. When I came home, Tor was sitting in the living room reading.
I changed my paint-spattered clothes, then came out to join him. For a moment I
stood in the doorway and studied his face and his body as if I were going to do
a portrait of him. I wanted to fix his image in my mind, just in case my ugly
secret lost him for me. I wanted to remember the strong line of his jaw, the
way his thick, straight hair fell over his forehead when he looked down, and
his broad hands that knew my body so well. He glanced up and smiled at me.