Sorcerer's Luck (5 page)

“I never eat breakfast.” He smiled at me. “But I thought you'd like some.”

I did. The coffee cake was wonderful. After I ate, I took a real bath, the first one I'd
had in a long time, and soaked the last of the grease smell away in the black
marble tub. Once my hair was dry, I took a nap myself in my room, to get ready
for the night ahead. Both Tor and I woke up late in the afternoon. After dinner
we sat in the living room and waited for illusions.

About a hour after sunset the first sound appeared. Laughter poured out of the kitchen,
the creepy howling kind that serial killers make in horror flicks. It gave me
nothing to draw, of course, so at first I thought we had no defense against it.
When it ended, we heard a high-pitched whine like a security system gone crazy
or a knife scraping across a china plate. Just when I thought I'd go crazy
myself, it stopped. I gasped in relief, and Tor let his breath in a long sigh.

“That must have been hell's hard work to create,” he said. “Maybe he'll run out of energy.”

“You keep saying he. You don't think a woman is doing this?”

“I don't, no. I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure it has to be a man.”

“Not some girl you jilted, huh?”

“I've never jilted anyone. They always leave me.”

I'd been trying to joke, but his quiet answer rang true.

“Well, sorry,” I said. “I—”

The blast from a trumpet interrupted me, a sour, out of tune, squeaking blast that played
the same four notes over and over. I clamped my hands over my ears. Tor
muttered something that I couldn't hear and got up.

He stalked into his bedroom and came back with a plastic bag of little orange cones:
earplugs. When I tried a pair, they brought the sound down to a tolerable
level. After a few more minutes, the trumpet fell silent. I took one of the
plugs out. Tor did the same.

“We could leave, I suppose,” he said. “Go out somewhere for a drink.”

“Do you think this guy's trying to make you do just that? Go out and leave the place
unguarded?”

“If that's his game, he doesn't know about the security system. I'm hoping he'll just give
up. Judging from what my books tell me, creating sound illusions is a lot
harder than the visual variety. Maybe he'll run out of steam.”

We put the earplugs back in when the automobiles started gunning their engines, racing
around the roof. The attack then switched to gunshots pinging off the appliances
in the bathroom. We clamped our hands over our ears to supplement the foam
plugs. When the gunshot noises stopped, the silence seemed to ring almost as
loudly as they had.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I was thinking about the things we saw yesterday. When I drew
them, they went away. That gives me an idea. It's not the drawing that did it.
It's the interpreting.”

The laughter returned to the kitchen about five minutes later. Apparently the guy
had a limited repertoire. I got up and walked over to the kitchen door. Once I
picked up the rhythm of the sounds, I could match them. I laughed like a maniac
in harmony for just a few seconds before words began tumbling out of my mouth.
I felt them as air pressure and lip movement, but except for an English word here
and there, I had no idea of what I was saying

The laughter stopped. I nearly fell, but I clutched the door jamb in time to steady
myself. When I turned around I saw that Tor had left the sofa and was standing
just a few feet away.

“You've got a talent for this,” he said. “Do you know what that language was?”

“What language?”

“The one you were speaking. Go sit down. You're pale.” He went into the kitchen.

Pale and sweaty and cold, I realized, horribly cold, as if I'd felt a blast from a
winter wind. I sank into a leather chair and slid down so I could rest my head
on the back of it. Tor returned and handed me a glass of cola.

“The sugar in it will help,” he said.

“But it's so cold.”

“Drink it anyway.”

He sat down on the couch across from me. I drank about a third of the cola straight off and
burped a couple of times. Sure enough, I began to feel better, physically at
least. Mentally—well, something had taken over my mind and made me speak in
words I couldn't understand. Terror and disbelief fought it out, and neither
won.

“What was I saying, anyway? I know some of it was English. I heard the word thief. And I
think I said ‘bear's son' a couple of times.”

“That's all I could understand, too.” Tor frowned, considering. “It reminded me of Gothic
or Old Norse, but it wasn't either of them. Older than they are, I bet. But I
don't get it. If he wants to accuse me of something, why disguise it like this?”

“Yeah. He could've just sent you a note. A first class stamp doesn't cost that much.”

Tor laughed with a breathy sort of chuckle. The sound reminded me of the bears I'd seen on
TV—chuffing, the voice-overs called it. I forced out a smile, but my heart
still pounded in fear. Thief. Who did the illusionist mean, me or Tor? Did he
know that I was a vampire, stealing other people's lives, one bite at a time?

“I hope to all the gods,” Tor said, “that the bastard's blown out his brain circuits.”

“Me, too. Do you think it'll start again?”

Tor shrugged. Yeah, I thought, silly question.

As it turned out, the concert had ended for the evening. Around midnight we went
downstairs to check on the lower flat. As soon as Tor opened the door, I felt
the wards. I heard nothing, but the sensation fell in the same category as
hearing those loud, high-pitched noises, or maybe staring into a bright light,
or maybe smelling skunk—I experienced none of those physical sensations, but
what I was sensing repelled me in the same way as they would have.

Tor made some gestures with his hands and said some words in a language I'd never heard
before. The sensations vanished.

“Now we can go in,” he said.

We did. He flipped a switch and turned on an overhead light. We'd entered a large room
which Tor had set up as a library. He had built-in bookcases crammed with
books, both cheap paperbacks and expensive leather-bound volumes, as well as
free-standing bookcases set here and there, equally crammed. On one side of the
room stood a fireplace that, I figured, stood under the one in the living room
above. This one was faced in antique brick instead of slabs of stone. Beside it
on the hearth stood a chunk of rock about a foot across and flat on top. Tor
noticed me looking at it.

“That's for the nisse.” He sounded embarrassed. “It's something I learned from my mother.
She came from Norway originally. She's pleased I keep the old custom up, so I
do it.”

“What's a nisse?”

“A house spirit, like a brownie. I put food on that rock for it now and then. On my
birthday, and the anniversary of Dad's death. Fourth of July, Christmas, days
like that.”

“That's kind of cool, actually. Does the food disappear?”

He shrugged and smiled in pink-cheeked embarrassment. I let the subject thud to the floor.
As well as the rock, a couple of leather armchairs and reading lamps stood in
front of the fireplace. Heavy maroon curtains shrouded the room from the view
of the uphill neighbors.

“I inherited these books from my father,” Tor told me. “I haven't even read most
of them.”

Off to the left I saw a kitchen, again, under the one in the flat above. Beyond the
kitchen, a hallway led into darkness. On the right I saw a closed door that, I
supposed, opened onto other rooms. Tor stood looking around, then shrugged.

“Nothing's wrong down here,” he said. “I don't understand this. Why would he give up so
easily?”

“Because he's planning something worse?”

Tor sighed, and his face sagged into gloom.

“Yeah,” he said. “With my luck that's probably it. Why don't you go upstairs? I'll set the
wards again and be right up.”

I grabbed my courage with both hands and went upstairs alone. I don't know what I
expected would happen, and nothing did. Tor came upstairs in a few minutes, and
we sat down in the living room.

“Maya, look,” he said. “You've got a real talent for sorcery. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn't.” I tried to smile. “I don't want to, either.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Who says I'm afraid?”

Tor considered me for a couple of uncomfortable minutes. He arranged his nerdy
smile and shrugged. “None of my business. Sorry. So what do you think of the
job?”

I shocked myself by finding it hard to speak. I wanted to scream, I don't want this
talent! I'm so getting out of here! The rational part of my mind thought about
the money. I took a deep breath.

“I guess it's okay,” I said. “It depends on what happens next.”

“The darkest moon night's almost past. The lunar energies, they'll disrupt the
sendings. And so will you if there are any.”

“Well, we can hope I will. How long—”

“Prime time's over as soon as the first sliver of the new moon appears in the sky.”

“So things will be cool after that?”

“I only wish. Look, he's got to be really powerful to send illusions like that. But you
turned them aside. That means he's lost this first round. He'll try something
different next, I bet.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know, but he's not going to just give up.” Tor spoke quietly, calmly. “You felt
the malice, didn't you? He hates me, whoever he is.”

That night I went to bed with the question, stay or quit? Rationally I knew I should turn
down the job, get out of the flat, forget I'd ever met Tor Thorlaksson. The
money wasn't enough to keep me there. I could find another part-time job if I
really tried. No one would ever make me talk in a language I didn't know again.

But I kept thinking about the theory behind what I'd seen. I could remember my father
talking about the astral tides and elemental forces that influenced magical
actions. Tor's “energies” fell into the same category, I figured. If only I
could figure out how to tap them! I realized that if I came to trust Tor,
really trust him, then maybe he could teach me how to deal with my disease. I
needed élan, life force, magical energy. He knew how to get it—maybe.

 Even if it sounds far-fetched and crazy, you snatch at any hope you see when you know you
could be dead before you hit thirty.

I went straight to school from Tor's place on Monday. When I came back to my basement
studio that afternoon, the smell of mildew hit me in the face. Somewhere there
had to be another leak. I walked around, examined the ceiling and the walls,
saw nothing—then looked behind the tin box of the shower. Gray mold clung in a
filigree on the wall. I nearly screamed, but I reminded myself that I had a
little extra money. I could buy cleanser to kill the mold and a bag of sponges
without jeopardizing my food budget.

Monday's mail brought me my monthly check from the burger joint. I parked near my bank
and walked over to the ATM in the bright hot afternoon. The sunlight hurt my
eyes even though I was wearing sunglasses. Standing on the concrete sidewalk
made my knees and ankles ache, a danger warning, symptoms of low élan. In a few
minutes, I knew, I'd start to sweat, but I felt cold, clammy rather than too
hot. In the small crowd at the machine, one rude guy stood way too close to me.
As the line moved, I started forward, then abruptly stopped. He plowed into me.
During the couple of seconds we were in contact, I managed to suck up some of
his élan, which hovered like thick mist around him. It seemed to slide down my
throat like a comforting sip of brandy.

“Jeez,” he said. “Sorry.”

The two middle-aged women in front of me made loud remarks about pushy young men.

“It's okay,” I said to them. “I'm not hurt or anything.”

Just the opposite—the pain in my legs had disappeared. The guy made sure he kept his
distance after that, unfortunately. I needed more élan. In the crowded
supermarket, a skinny shrew of a woman pushed past me at the vegetable display
to grab the primo head of broccoli I was aiming for. As her arm swept along
mine, I sucked up a long swallow of her life force. My eyes eased, and the
bright light over the display dimmed to a comfortable level. She got the
broccoli, but I noticed that when she turned away, she shook her head and
rubbed her forehead as if it suddenly ached.

I'd taken too much from her. If I could have apologized, I would have. I hoped she'd
recover, even if she was a bitch. I did no more hunting in the market. When I
got outside with my purchases, the sunlight looked normal, no longer painfully
bright.

The thefts gave me enough energy to scrub down the mildew when I got home, but the smell
of the cleanser drove me out of the studio. I took my backpack and laptop with
me so I could leave the window open to let the place air out. I owned nothing
else worth stealing. I sat in my car out on the street and wondered where I
could go to pass some time. Maybe I could find a crowd where I could steal more
élan.

The memory of Tor's flat haunted me, the beautiful rooms, the comfortable bed, the good
food he'd fixed for me. I kept remembering him saying that if I wanted, I could
live there. What would it be like, I wondered, to share a flat with a sorcerer
who claimed he turned into an animal now and then? Terrifying, I decided.
Unthinkable. Crazy dumb idea. I refused to live with sorcery all around me,
especially not if he was going to tell me I had talent. I had to have a place
of my own to return to after the days I worked.

But I kept thinking about him. He'd treated me really decently, not just by hiring me, but
in normal ways. No one else had cooked a meal for me in years. He'd taken the
time to make me a special breakfast even though he'd been tired. No one else
had given me a comfortable bed to sleep on and made sure I had clean towels and
good soap for a bath. And I liked the way he looked, lean but muscled, a strong
clean jaw, thick sandy hair. I wondered what it would be like to kiss that cute
dimple at the corner of his mouth.

“Torvald Thorlaksson.” I whispered his name, just once, before I realized what I was
doing.

My phone rang: Tor.

“Hi,” he said. “Uh, you weren't thinking of summoning me, were you?”

“No. Why?”

“I was just kind of thinking about you, and then I thought I heard you.” He sighed. “Sorry.
I won't bother you.”

“It's okay. Really.”

A pause. “Do you want to go out for lunch?”

“Yeah, I'd like that. Let me tell you where I am. I'm sitting in my car.”

I gave him the cross-streets and hung up. In about three minutes, if that long, someone
knocked on the sidewalk-side window of the car. I yelped, turned in my seat—Tor,
smiling at me. Before I could say anything, he opened the car door and slid
into the passenger seat. He rolled the window all the way down before he shut
the door.

“Why are you sitting in your car?” Tor said.

“I had to do some heavy-duty cleaning in my apartment, and I'm letting it air out. Mildew
behind the shower.”

“That apartment. It sucks.”

“Yeah. I'm afraid so.”

“You really could come live in my place. The full-time job. Room and board and five hundred
a month.” He stared out of the windshield. “It was cool, having you there.”

“It was kind of cool being there. Well, until the noises started.”

“You got the better of those. You'd have your own room and your own bathroom.”

I reminded myself of the spell he'd tried to cast over me at the county fair. How could I
trust this man? I'd only known him a couple of weeks. He watched me with sad
brown eyes—the wild animal's eyes, I thought. Not quite human.

“Are you going to be able to work two jobs once school starts?” Tor said.

“I'll have to try. I won't be able to go full-time. I only need to take nine units to keep
my scholarship.”

“Shit, that sounds exhausting.”

It would be, but I refused to admit it.

“I get this feeling about you,” Tor went on, “that you're always on the edge of being
exhausted.”

I went cold and very still. Did he know about my disease? My heart started pounding, a
dangerous waste of energy for someone like me. I tried to calm down. He
couldn't know. How could he know?

“What's wrong?” he said. “Maya, hey, I didn't mean to upset you.” He opened the car
door. “Look, I'll go away. Think about the offer, okay? I just want to help—”

“Help with what?” I snarled at him and regretted it.

He winced. “I'm really blowing it,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

He got out of the car and started to shut the door.

“Wait!” I said. “I'm sorry, too. I don't mean to be rude.”

He hesitated, then got back into the car, but he left the door open.

“You're right about me being tired,” I said. “All my friends tell me I push too hard. I
just don't know what else to do.”

“If I hadn't worked that stupid spell at the fair, would you feel better about the
offer?”

“Yeah, I would.”

“I'll never do anything like that again. I swore it on the runes, and I'll swear it again
if you want me to.”

I hesitated. I kept remembering how clean his flat was, no mildew, no gray
streaks on the ceiling, no dope dealers on the corner, no worry about someone
breaking in. Shape-changer, I reminded myself. He told me he turned into a bear
of all damn things! What if it's true?

“Think about it,” he said and shut the car door. “Let's go have lunch. Not at a burger
place. Like Indian food?”

“Sure do. Just tell me how to get to it.”

He laughed and gave me directions to a nice little restaurant in Berkeley. Since the lunch
hour was long over, we had the place pretty much to ourselves, which meant we
could actually hear ourselves talk. We ordered a dosa stuffed with curried
vegetables to share, some sag paneer, and various side dishes, along with rose
flavored soda for me and an Indian beer for Tor. While we ate, we chatted about
nothing important, the food, mostly. At one point, the conversation drifted to
pets.

“We always had cats when I was growing up,” I said, “but I couldn't keep a pet where I am
now. It would be animal cruelty.”

“For sure. My dad liked cats. He had an old tomcat that died just before he did. I didn't
tell him, though. He was so sick by then that it probably would have pushed him
over the edge, so I just made up stuff about how the cat was waiting for him to
come home.” He fell silent for a long minute. “I don't know if he believed me
or not.”

“You didn't have him home? Y'know, the hospice program and all that.”

“I wanted to, but the idea really freaked my mother. It would be putting death into the
house, she said. Dad didn't want her any more upset than she was already, so he
decided to die in the hospital.”

“Was that the house you're in now?”

“No. We were living in Mill Valley then. Y'know, I'm sorry. I keep talking about gloomy
stuff like Dad dying. I'm not real good at being social. Small talk. That kind
of thing. I spend too much time alone.”

“I'm not real good at it myself.”

He smiled but said nothing more. For a little while we ate in silence.

“I like cats,” Tor said abruptly, “but I was afraid to get one once I was—” He lowered
his voice. “bitten, you know.” He glanced around, but no one was in hearing
range. “What if the bjarki killed it? They're omnivores, bears. They eat
animals when they can catch them.”

“They do? Crap! I always thought they lived on berries and honey.”

“Only in the kids' movies. They even paw fish out of streams.” He paused to put the last
piece of the dosa onto my plate. “If you're going to be there for those days, I
guess I could get a couple of kittens. You'll be locking me in. They'll be
safe.”

“And I can play with them when I'm there.”

He smiled, and the cute dimple got a little deeper and cuter. We lingered over chai and
halvah for maybe another half-hour. When we left, he shook my hand and strode
away. At the corner, at a crossroads as he'd called it, he disappeared. As I
walked back to my car, I had to admit that I wished he'd stayed a little
longer.

Maybe I'm stuck with being a vampire, but I refused to sponge off my friends in that way
or any other way. Tuesday I offered to pay Cynthia and Brittany back for the
lunch they'd shared with me. They laughed and waved me off.

“What'll you bet, though,” I said, “that my brother shows up soon? He always seems to
know when I've got money.”

“What kind of drugs is he on, anyway?” Brittany said.

“I don't know, for sure. It can't be heroin, because I've seen him in short-sleeved
shirts, and he doesn't have needle marks.”

“He could be snorting it. I saw this on the news. People who never would have used
needles, but they breathe this stuff in through their noses.” Brittany made a
sour face. “Yuck! Real glamorous, huh?”

“Yeah, for sure! Maybe that's it, then. Sometimes when I see Roman he's really out there
somewhere. He sees things moving that aren't moving, letters on billboards,
pictures, that kind of stuff.”

“That sounds more like opium,” Cynthia put in.

“I'll take your word for it,” I said. “The only drugs he's ever actually mentioned are
painkillers, codeine and oxy-something.”

“He might use those when he can't get the other stuff,” Cynthia said.

“Codeine's super-addictive,” Brittany put in. “It's bad all by itself. Not as bad as
heroin, but still! Yuck!”

Sure enough, Roman smelled money and tracked me down. On Wednesday the three of us
had just come out of class when we saw Roman walking toward us across the lawn.
In the hot bright noontide he was wearing a pair of torn-up jeans and a faded
olive khaki T-shirt, but at least they looked clean. He smelled like he'd had a
shower and a shave recently, too.

The T-shirt hung loose on Roman's chest. He'd cinched in the jeans with a belt. I hated
seeing him look so hungry, but if I gave him cash, he wouldn't spend it on
food. He smiled at me, a wan little twitch of his mouth.

“Maya?” he said. “Can I um uh talk with you? Just for a minute.”

“No,” I said. “I'm not giving you money. I'm not going to help you hurt yourself.”

He blushed scarlet, glanced at Cynthia, then turned around and took a few steps away. I
could guess that he'd just realized my friends knew about the drug problem. I'd
humiliated him without meaning to. When I went after him, he kept his back
turned toward me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “But I get so worried about you I have to share it with someone.”

He turned around, trembling, and stared at the ground in front of my feet.

“Ro, please listen!” I used his childhood nickname on purpose. “Please! Can't you get help
somewhere? You're never going to be able to quit on your own. I know that.”

“Yeah, so do I.” He spoke so low that I could barely hear him. “The counselor says
there's a program. I could go to a group session today. But it costs twenty
bucks.”

 I could afford to help him. I'd earned three hundred dollars over the weekend. I was
just so afraid that he'd spend it on pills.

“If I gave you the money, would you go? Would you really go?”

“Why lie? Probably not.” He looked up and took a step back.

Brittany had come up to join us. She considered Roman in a way I can only call clinical.

“You need to rebuild,” she announced. “Vitamins, B vitamins, just for starters. And C.
Users always need C. Your aura's a mess.”

“Another nut like Dad!” Roman said. “What the fuck?”

Brittany ignored the language and turned to me. “If you gave me the money, and I drove him
to the session, he couldn't spend it on drugs.”

I goggled, I'll admit it. Brittany, have such a practical idea? Cynthia walked up and laid
a hand on my shoulder.