Sorcerer's Luck (6 page)

“I'd let her try if I were you,” she murmured.

Roman took a step back from the three of us. He blushed again from sheer surprise, as if
he'd turned a corner and seen the Fates spinning his thread.

“What about it, Ro?” I said. “Will you let Brittany drive you in?”

He hesitated, then glanced Brittany's way. What he saw made him stare fascinated
at her. The drugs had such a hold on him that he hadn't noticed her looks
before. She was slender and beautiful, with long blonde hair and big blue eyes,
currently filled with sympathy.

“Look at those.” Brittany pointed at his right forearm, tattooed with the Marine Corps
logo and a bulldog in a helmet. “Some devil dog you are, if you can't take a
challenge like this.”

Roman swallowed heavily and continued staring at her.

“Well?” Brittany set her hands on her hips.

“Okay, yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”

I handed over the money. Brittany gave me a small, strong smile and a nod of her head,
then slipped her arm through Roman's and led him off toward the parking lot. In
a condition close to shock, I watched them go. Cynthia laughed under her
breath.

“Brittany loves a rescue project,” she said. “Usually it's stray dogs, but I think she's
just branched out. Your brother's awfully good looking when he's healthy. She
really does know nutrition, you know. She's not as stupid as all that occult
stuff makes her sound.”

“Oh yeah. I'd never deny it. And don't think I'm not really grateful. I'm just surprised.”

“At what? That she thought of it?”

“No, that he went for it. Oh god, I hope it works. The group therapy, I mean. I hope to
god it helps him.”

Brittany called me a couple of hours later, while Cynthia and I were having coffee in our
usual cafe. With her pushing him, Roman had gone to the session, which, it
turned out, was actually free, because a well-known local charity ran the
program. He'd been scamming money out of me. No, I reminded myself. It's not
him. It's the drugs, maybe heroin, maybe painkillers, everything he takes.
That's what's goading him to get money out of me.

“I used the twenty to buy him some good vitamins,” she told me. “And made him promise to
take two a day. I hope that's okay, and you didn't need the money back.”

“I didn't, no. Thanks. I really mean it, thanks so much.”

“And he promised to call me every day and tell me if he's going to the session. I made
him promise not to lie. He just has to tell me yes or no.”

“And if he says no?”

“I won't cook him dinner on Saturday. It's like a big dog treat, really. When they sit,
they get a treat. They don't, no treat.”

“Wow. It sounds so simple.”

“It won't be. This could take a couple of years, getting him clean. But I gotta try. I
mean, he like served our country, didn't he? And there's something . . .” She
paused for a long moment.

“Something what?” I said.

“You'll only laugh at me.”

“I won't. Promise.”

“Don't tell Cynthia, but I think he's got psychic vibes.”

As promised, I didn't laugh. I did sigh.

“See?” Brittany said. “I told you wouldn't believe me. But okay. Besides that, he's totally cute.”

“Cute and dangerous. Brittany, please be careful, okay?”

“I will. I've never been bitten yet, y'know, not even by the pit bulls.”

After I hung up, it occurred to me that I'd spoken the truth: I really didn't need the
money back, thanks to my job with Tor. Having a friend step in to help with Roman
eased my mind as well. I mentioned that to Cynthia.

“Good,” she said. “By the way, you don't look as tired today as you usually do.”

“Thanks. I've been thinking about school. I'll only take nine units in the fall so I can
work more without running myself down. I don't absolutely have to graduate in
four years. I could take an extra quarter.”

“That's more loan debt, though, isn't it? I mean, I think you're right to cut back.
It's just that everything costs so much these days.”

“Yeah, and the landlord just raised the rent on me.”

“For that hole? God, he's got his nerve! You know, if you ever have to move, you can come
stay with me and Jim for a couple of days while you find somewhere else.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate the offer. With luck though I'll have the new place before I
have to get out of that one. It really is a hole. You're right.”

When I returned to my apartment, the lingering smell of chlorine and mildew brought
back memories of Tor's flat and the Burne-Jones bedroom. I sat down on my one
chair and tried to reason with myself. The pros: nice place, good money, not
pay rent means quit burger job, start paying off credit cards. The cons:
sorcery, bjarki, more sorcery, illusionist who might attack again. I wasn't
sure which category Tor himself fell in, pro or con. It depended, I supposed,
on whether he was in bear form or just himself. From the restrained way he'd
shaken my hand at the end of our encounters, it looked like he was willing to
keep our relationship on a business footing.

“Tor,” I said aloud. “Torvald Thorlaksson.”

I waited for half an hour, but he never called. I decided to stop kidding myself and
called him.

“Good to hear from you.” He sounded so pleased that I could imagine his smile, dimple
and all.

“Is the offer of that full-time job still open?” I said.

“Sure. You could take it anytime.”

“How about before my August rent's due? That's on Friday.”

“How about today? I can help you pack.”

“I don't have enough stuff to need help. I'll see you in a little while.”

As soon as I got off the phone with Tor, I called my landlord to tell him he could have
his slum hole back. The stuff I owned fit into one suitcase and two cardboard
cartons. Most of my art supplies lived in a locker at school. I drove over to
Tor's place and parked in front of the house. In the early afternoon light I
could see the hillside behind it more clearly. At first glance it looked like a
forest, but I could pick out a roof here and a redwood deck there. The pieces
added up to two more houses with heavy plantings around them.

Tor came out and helped me carry everything upstairs. I stowed the suitcase and cartons
in my new bedroom, then rejoined him in the kitchen. He gave me keys and also
set up my smartphone for the security system so I could get in if he happened
to be gone.

“Just make sure you arm the system again once you get upstairs,” he said. “I'll show you
how.”

“Thanks. You've got some awfully nice things. I can see why you're worried about
security. Those Chinese vases!”

“They're not tourist items, no.”

“You've got all kinds of cool stuff. I'm kind of surprised you'd trust me like this. I
mean, we just met.”

He gave me the strangest smile. I couldn't tell if he was amused or saddened by what I'd
just said. “Oh yeah,” he said eventually. “But I've got ways of checking a
person out. I know I can trust you.”

“Ways? You mean with sorcery, I guess.”

“Yeah. You're not offended, are you?”

I considered. “No,” I said. “It's a lot easier than having to supply references.”

I was expecting him to laugh or at least smile, but he just nodded, as if he agreed.

“What else do you need to know?” he went on. “There's the garage. I don't have a car any
more, so you might as well use it.”

“You don't have a car? How do you get around—uh, sorry, never mind.”

“Sorcery's a lot more ecologically sound than burning fossil fuels. It's too bad that not
everyone can do it.”

“Yeah, for sure. And speaking of burning things, I've got to get ready for work.”

Quitting the burger job gave me my next big thrill. I went to work as usual, but as soon
as I arrived, I told the manager I was leaving. I offered to stay on for a
couple of days while they found someone else, but the manager had a file of
students who wanted the job. No problem, he said. At the end of my shift, I was
free of deep-fried grease at last. The night manager, a decent guy in his way,
wished me luck with my new job.

“Thanks,” I said. “Is there any way I can get my last check early?”

“They all ask that.” He sighed and shrugged. “I'll hit up the boss for it. Don't hold
your breath.”

When I got back to the flat, Tor insisted I sit down and rest. I let myself sink into one
of the leather chairs in the living room while he bustled around in the
kitchen. He came out again with brandy in proper glass snifters.

“Just something to celebrate with,” he said. “Celebrate you getting out of that
apartment, I mean.”

“Thanks. And I've quit the burger job, too. So that's something else to celebrate.”

He saluted me with his glass. I had a sip of the brandy—very good, probably old, I
figured, and expensive. I turned a little in my chair to look out at the view
through the western window. Fog had crept in over San Francisco, though Yerba Buena Island
and the East Bay were still clear. The lights of the distant city made the fog glow, shot
here and there with streaks of color. In our companionable mood
I came close to telling him the truth about my disease. Close, but not close
enough—what if he threw me out? Rooming with vampires doesn't fit most people's
definition of gracious living.

“You know something?” Tor said. “It's good to have you here.”

“It's good to be here.”

It was only a polite thing to say, but it gave me the oddest sensation—that I'd spoken
something more true than I could know. For a brief moment I felt as if I'd been
struggling to accomplish some task for a really long time, for years and years,
even. I'd finally finished it. Or maybe I'd lost something, years and years
ago, that I'd finally found again. None of it made sense. I put the sensation
down to the brandy.

Later, when I went to my room, I looked at the decoupage on the writing desk. The green
lion had returned to eat the sun, but around him the circles of shrimp and caterpillars
had vanished. In their place flew butterflies.

I slept so well in the Burne-Jones bedroom that I got to school late the next morning.
During class, I had trouble concentrating on our current model, a man with an
interesting but difficult asymmetric face. He had pale skin and thinning blond
hair that he wore long and straggly. Trying to keep the textures of skin and
hair separate drove me nuts, especially since part of my mind kept wondering
how I was going to tell my friends about my new job. Cynthia noticed how
distracted I was. When the model took his mid-morning break, she came over to
my easel.

“Is something wrong?” she said.

“No, actually. Things are looking up. I quit the burger joint.”

“That's great!” Cynthia grinned at me. “New job, huh?”

Brittany had drifted over to join us. “Sweet!” she said. “It couldn't have
been good for you, breathing all that meat grease. And eating there, too.” She shuddered with
high drama. “Dead chemical food!”

“I'm glad to be out of there, yeah.”

“Well, what's the new job?” Cynthia said.

I realized that the truth, or at least, part of it, could transform itself into the lie I
needed. “Taking care of a shape-changer. Someone who turns into an animal now
and then. Like in the folk tales, y'know?”

They both burst out laughing. “Oh come on, Maya!” Cynthia said. “What is it really?”

“That's it, really. This guy turns into a bear when the moon's full, and he's paying me to
lock him into his room so he doesn't go out and hurt anyone.” I kept my
expression as serious as I could. “I get room and board, so I'm living there.
Kind of an au pair for a were-bear.”

“I get it now!” Cynthia was grinning at me. “You've moved in with some guy. You've been
holding out on us about him.”

“No, this is strictly a business arrangement.”

“Oh yeah sure!” Brittany said. “Is he cute?”

“For a bear he's not bad. His name's Torvald, but I call him Tor. His family's from Iceland.”

“That's probably why he's a shape-changer.” Cynthia seemed to find my supposed joke
worth elaborating. “The lonely glacial island and Viking settlers and all that
amazing history.”

“And the volcanoes.” Brittany was speaking in dead seriousness. “Volcanoes are always
centers of spiritual power. There's prana in them. Or something like that. They
release it, anyway.”

Although Cynthia rolled her eyes, I wondered if for a change Brittany was making sense.
I'd seen National Geographic TV shows about volcanoes, and you could sense how
powerful and strange and terrifying they were just from the footage. In person
they must have inspired genuine awe. I could believe they did release some kind
of sorcerous energy.

“Actually,” I said, “he's a shape-changer because he got bitten by one over in Marin. There
aren't any volcanoes over there.”

“Just some totally weird people, huh?” Cynthia said. “Do we get to meet Tor?”

“I don't see why not. But it'll have to be when the moon isn't full.”

They both laughed, and I grinned, but all I was doing was speaking the truth. You get
good at weaseling when you've got a disease like mine. Their laughter made me
realize something else, that the idea of a good-looking guy like Tor turning
into a bear was too funny to be true. I thought of all those bears in movies
for kids, the big, clumsy, furry clowns, or the sluggish critters I'd seen at
the zoo. On the TV docs I'd seen some dangerous wild bears, fierce as tigers,
and they could move really fast when they wanted to, but still! It can't be
true, I told myself. It's just some kind of a joke on his part. A sorcerer's
sense of humor was bound to be more than a little weird.

Before I left the campus I went to the Admin office and changed my address. I felt oddly
solemn as I filled out the form, as if I'd made a crucial, momentous decision.
I reminded myself that I could switch back to part-time at Tor's and find
another place to live any time I wanted.

That afternoon, Tor and I worked out our routine around meals. He never ate
breakfast, but he insisted on stocking up on breakfast things for me. He would
do the shopping and cooking, and I'd clean up afterwards. I felt guilty at
first. With the money he was paying me, I thought I should be doing more, but I
was an awful cook, and he was a good one. He also had a housekeeping service
come in twice a month to take care of the real cleaning. I began to feel like I
was starting not a job but a vacation.

Tor also made a point of showing me both flats. No secrets, he told me, not like in
those fairy tales. I knew the ones he meant, where the girl always opens the
Forbidden Thing and suffers for it.

“There's nothing here I need to keep secret,” Tor said. “You know the worst already.”

He grinned at me, and I had to smile in return. That dimple at the corner of his mouth!

I'd already seen the library room downstairs, the place where you entered the flat. In
daylight I noticed a washer and dryer set up in the adjoining kitchen. The rest
of it pretty much followed the plan of the upper one, except of course for the
chunk cut out for the upper flat's entrance and staircase. Beyond the library
to the left as you came in was the smaller bedroom and bathroom, both echoing
empty, though at the very end of the hall I spotted a closed door—a closet
maybe—that I hadn't seen upstairs.

Off to the right of the library was the master suite. Instead of a bedroom set, though,
the big room held a pair of wooden stools and a tall but narrow wooden table
that reminded me of the chemistry lab in my old high school. Tor opened the
cream-colored drapes over the window to let in some light. In the middle of the
room lay a black carpet painted with a white circle, about nine feet across, in
the center. Inside the circle an equal-armed cross cut it into four quarters.
Where each line of the cross touched the circle, a red letter marked one of the
cardinal directions.

“You can step on that,” Tor said. “It's not active at the moment.”

He led me across the room to a feature that didn't match the upstairs, a huge closet that
lacked windows. I figured that someone had built it by taking space out of the
master bedroom itself. One wall held a solid rank of wooden drawers, most of
them shallow, like you'd find in the storerooms of an old-fashioned museum to
hold trays of antique jewelry or prints.

“The guy who owned it before me put those in,” Tor said. “I don't know why.”

“You own this building?”

“Yeah. I need to, with the stuff I do.”

Two luxury flats in the Oakland hills—his family must have had money, all right, heaps of
it. I wasn't surprised when I noticed, on the opposite wall, a door to a
combination safe.

“Want to see my secret treasures?” He was grinning at me.

“Sure.”

I politely looked away while he worked the combination. One treasure turned out to be an
old-fashioned oak display case, about two feet on a side. Tor laid it down on a
wooden lectern in front of the storage unit. Against a background of yellowing
linen, dimpled like an egg carton, it held a set of wooden disks, each about
the size of a quarter. The wood looked ancient, dark and rubbed smooth by the
touch of many years and even more hands. Each disk was engraved with a spiky,
geometric mark, a letter of an ancient writing system.

“Those are runes,” I said. “I've seen pictures of them in books on graphic design. It's
the older alphabet, right?”

“The elder futhark, yes. This is a set that's come down in the family for close to six
hundred years. I don't take them out, of course. They'd probably crumble if I
tried.”

“I hope that mount's archival material.”

“It is, yeah. I had it checked just last year over in San Francisco. Even shut up like
this, they have power.” Tor ran one finger down the glass. His voice dropped to
a near-whisper. “I can feel it even when they're in the safe. They fuel my
work.”

Without thinking I started to touch the side of the case. I felt an odd emanation, as
if touching it would give me an electric shock. I drew my hand back fast. Tor
tipped his head a little to one side and considered me.

“It's okay,” he said. “There's nothing special about the case. It's something my father got
at a garage sale. I think it originally held dead insects.”

“I didn't want to be rude or anything. It was just my inner child coming out, I guess.”

“Just so long as you don't want to put them in your mouth.”

We shared a laugh. As he was putting the display case away, I noticed the only other object
in the safe: a shoebox.

“What's that?” I said. “Or am I being nosey?”

“No, not at all. I wanted to show you everything.”

He brought out the shoebox and opened it to reveal layers of cotton batting. He lifted
those to one side and pulled out a flat golden square, inscribed with runes,
big enough to cover the palm of his hand, and Tor had big hands. When he gave
it me, it weighed heavy—solid gold. I whistled under my breath.

“I keep it in the safe because of the gold,” he said. “I wouldn't want anyone stealing it
to melt it down. They couldn't sell an item like this on the open market.”

“Yeah, for sure! How old is it?”

“The experts think it dates from the last century before Christ.”

I whistled again. “Where's it from originally?”

“The best guess is Gotland. That's an island off the coast of Sweden. My father had the
gold analyzed, and it came from Eastern Europe, from mines on one of the
ancient Gothic trade routes.”

I examined the plaque more carefully. It had a hole at each corner, probably so it could
be sewn onto a backing—I guessed horse harness, something leather, at any rate,
because cloth would have ripped from the weight. The runic inscription ran
around the edge. In the center sat a quartered circle like the one painted on
the carpet—not a rune, but a very ancient and practically universal sign. On
the back more runes formed a spiral.

“What does it say?”

“No one's really sure. It's most likely some kind of magical formula. Practically all the
runes that have ever been found carved on objects are. The language must be
some form of proto-Gothic, very old and real obscure. I made a rubbing of both
sides. I've got it upstairs somewhere, and one of these days I'll work on it.”
He paused for a smile. “But it's got something to do with the Rime Jötnar, the
frost giants. Ever heard of them?”

“No, I really don't know much about Nordic lore,” I said. “When you study art history,
or Western art history, I should say, but anyway, you learn a lot about the
Graeco-Roman myths, but not about the Norse.”

“I can give you books if you're interested.” Tor thought for a moment, frowning. “Yeah, I
do have some in English. There are two main sources, the
Prose Edda
and
the
Poetic Edda
, and I can give you translations. They're good stories.”

“Cool! I love good stories.” I held out the gold ornament. “I don't mean to be nosey,
but where did you get this piece?”

“Where I get everything. I inherited it. I'm pretty useless on my own, or so I've been
told.”

Although he smiled, I heard a touch of bitterness in his voice. He took the gold ornament
from me and stroked it with one finger. In a minute or maybe two, he went on, “A
long time ago now my great-grandfather was digging a well on the family farm.
He found a hoard of gold objects. In those days there wasn't any government
archaeology board to buy up finds like that. So Great-Grandfather sold it off
piecemeal, all except for this one thing, and hid the cash in a pickling crock
in the farmhouse kitchen.” He looked up and smiled again, but this time the
bitterness was gone. “His son, my grandfather Halvar, found the cash and
invested it. He's the one who made the family wealthy.”

“I'm surprised he didn't sell this piece, too.”

“I'm not sure why he didn't. Probably because no one knew what it was, and he was afraid
of selling it too cheap.” The bitterness returned to his voice. “Grandfather
Halvar didn't like making bad bargains.”

Tor returned the gold ornament to its batting, box, and the safe. Before we went
back upstairs, he looked over the shelves in his library and found a stack of
books for me to read, the two Eddas, some books on Norse history, and then a
modern compilation of Norse myths.

“By the way,” I said, “you don't have a TV, do you?”

“No. I hate them. They're useless noise, and they ruin people's brain waves.”

I had no idea how to respond to that. He gave me a thin smile, as if he knew he'd
shocked me.

“Look,” he said. “Would you rub dirt into your eyes? Of course not! Well, your mind's the
most important thing you have, and watching the crap they put on is just like
rubbing dirt into it. Especially the commercials. Brain poison, that's what
they are.”

“Uh, well, if you say so.”

“I won't have one in the house.”

“Okay. I can live without it. I just wondered.”

He was my boss, after all. I figured that if there was a show I absolutely had to watch,
I could get it on my laptop or go to Cynthia's. Her husband had set up their
flat screen TV on cable with a couple of DVRs, and they'd invited me over a
number of times to catch up on stuff I'd missed.

That night Tor and I lingered at dinner, talking over the day. After I cleaned up the
kitchen, Tor poured us each brandy, and we sat down in the living room. Through the west window
I could see the lights of San Francisco, blurred by fog/ “I love this view,” I said.