Sorcerer's Luck (3 page)

“These things only show up when the moon's dark.”

“Yeah? I guess they're not made of moonbeams, then. When the moon's full, do they turn into wolves?”

“No. I—” He caught himself and gave me the foolish nerd smile. “Not exactly.”

“Ah come on! Do you really think you turn into a wolf?”

“No. I turn into a bear.”

“You turn into a bear on full moon nights? You mean, like a werewolf, but it's a bear?”

“Yes. It's called a bjarki.” His smile vanished. “Think of it as an old Norse tradition. Well, maybe an old Norse curse. I'm a shape-changer.”

He spoke so calmly, so quietly, that I was tempted to believe him. Only tempted, not convinced. The only real bears I'd ever seen lived in the zoo, fat, clumsy-looking creatures. I couldn't imagine this tall, lean maniac turning into one.

“That's the second catch,” I said.

“Yeah, fraid so.” He sighed. “The full moon nights? Your job would be locking me in my room when I change into the bear form. Just to make sure I don't get carried away and go out and hurt someone.”

“Have you ever hurt someone?”

“No. Sometimes the temptation—” He shuddered, and his eyes turned dark. “But I've always managed to fight it off. Month after month after month. It would be great to be locked in and not have to worry about giving in. Y'know?”

“I can see that, yeah.”

“Uh, do you want to go home now? You must think I'm some weird rich guy who'd be in an asylum if he didn't have money. Diagnosed with delusions.”

I would have thought exactly that except for three things. When I'd drawn his face, I'd seen the torment in his eyes. When I'd called his name, he'd appeared. And we'd walked from my studio to his flat in a couple of minutes. I was actually seeing the magic that my father had so longed to have, even if the magician did think he turned into a bear now and then.

“Can I ask you something before we go?” I said. “Like, how did you become a buh—whatever?”

“Buh-yark-ee. I was bitten about a year ago. I was hiking on Mount Tam and saw this creature following me. I thought it was just a lost dog, so I didn't run. It attacked me.” He sighed. “It was a wolf, a lycanthrope. I didn't know those were real.”

“How did you get away?”

“A transmission spell, like the one I never should have used on you. I was terrified, so I shared my terror with him. He ran off howling.”

“That's really clever.”

“Thanks. Sorcery has its practical aspects.”

“But if the creature was a wolf, why do you turn into a bjarki?”

“I don't know. All I know is I never made the change before I was bitten, and afterwards I did. What else could have caused it?”

He might have been crazy, or he might have brushed up against some dark and evil thing. Like in the folk tales, I thought, things like me. His eyes told me that either way, his torment was real.

“So anyway,” he went on, “I had to have a series of rabies shots. Shit, those hurt!” He shook himself as if remembering. “But it turned out that rabies was the least of my problems.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I went on to the next question. “You say you can't see illusions, but you're wearing one, aren't you? The one I saw through when I drew you.”

“Yeah, I can cast minor ones, but I'm just learning. Casting an illusion on yourself is the first step when you're studying the subject.”

“These jars and things. Are you sure they're not just something you've created by accident? Images from your dreams, maybe?”

“They can't be, because I can't dispel them. I can dispel the one on me. Like I said, that's Step One. But these must be what my books call major illusions. They last for hours, they're detailed, and I can't make a dent in them.”

“What's weird is that makes sense.”

He didn't bother to smile, just watched me with sad eyes, sure that I was going to do the sane thing and turn down the job. So was I.

Before I told him so, I tried to see him as he really was without drawing him first. The nerdy guy in front of me changed to the face I'd caught in my drawing: young, certainly, and good-looking, but his dark eyes narrowed with despair and old grief, and he'd clamped his lips to hold back sorrow. The pain touched me at a deep level, like a guitar when you pluck one string and the others vibrate in sympathy. I had a secret of my own, not that I was ready to tell him about it.

“When it comes time to lock you in the room,” I said, “would you give me trouble about it?”

“No.” He held up one hand like a Boy Scout. “I promise you that. I set up the master suite months ago. It's got a bathroom in it. I even have a little refrigerator with a pedal you step on to open it, so I can feed myself. Uh, you're not a vegan, are you?”

“I wouldn't work in a burger joint if I was.”

“Right. The problem I have with the suite is staying in it. The bjarki wants to run, you see. He's desperate to get out and go back to the forest. In three days I could wake up and find myself a long way from home. Y'know?”

“You couldn't just—well—travel the way we got here tonight? Get home that way?”

“Not if I didn't know where I was starting from. It's always the beginning of the action that counts in sorcery. That's the crucial point for everything you do.”

“Oh.” It occurred to me that believing you were a bear could be just as dangerous as actually turning into one. “So there you'd be, with no way to get back.”

“And with no clothes, either. No ID. Nothing.”

“Oh jeez.” I refused to let myself wonder what he'd look like naked—pretty good, I suspected.

“I thought about locking the door from the inside. He doesn't have opposable thumbs, so he couldn't undo the locks. Then I thought, what if the building caught on fire, or there was an earthquake?”

“I can see why you're afraid of being trapped.”

He heard the sympathy in my voice and began to look hopeful. “Uh, would you like to see the room that would be your room? I mean, if you were crazy enough to take the job. Which you aren't.” He stood up. “It's just down this hall. Way on the opposite side of the flat from mine.”

“Sure. Why not?”

He showed me a large airy room, painted teal with white trim, with a big west-facing window and brocade drapes over lace sheers. When I pulled the curtains open, I saw the Bay, the Bay Bridge, and San Francisco glittering on the horizon. The single bed had an oak headboard carved with a pattern of flowers and vines. The tall dresser matched it. In one corner sat a little writing desk and a comfortable-looking upholstered green armchair. Just across the hall was a bathroom with a black marble tub as well as a shiny-clean shower stall.

Don't get me wrong. The luxury didn't change my mind. His hope did. He was watching me with wide eyes but a slack smile, a wary look that made me think of feral cats. My mom would put out food for them, and they'd watch her from a distance, wanting it, wondering if they dared take it. If he truly were a bjarki, a feral animal was exactly what he was.

“Okay, look,” I said. “I've got to go home right now and get some sleep. I'm wiped out. But I'll try that part-time job.”

He stared open-mouthed. “You must be desperate,” he said at last.

“Yeah, I am. For all kinds of reasons.”

Let me tell you something about vampires, real vampires like me, not
those slimy thugs in the old horror movies or the sparkly, sexy kind
in the new movies, either. We are not undead, for starters. We aren't
going to hang around crumbling for thousands of years. If anything,
we have shorter lives than most people, just because it's so hard to
maintain our life force habit. It's not blood we crave. It's life force,
chi, élan vital, whatever name you want to give it. Blood carries more
of it than other kinds of tissue, so we're always tempted to shed blood
and then suck up the life force as it flows.

Some of us turn to the bad and drain anyone they can get their hands on.
That's where the legends started, I guess, back in the Middle Ages in Europe,
where the genetic mutation first appeared. Desperate sufferers of our weird
disease probably did stalk victims at night, but not because they'd die
from the touch of sunlight. When they met a defenseless person, they would
have grabbed them and harvested all of the victim's life force right there
and then. Do things like that in broad daylight, where you can be seen and
identified, and you end up with a stake through your heart.

It's possible, however, to skim just a little bit of someone else's life,
a drop here, a teaspoon there. They'll never miss it, because a healthy
person can regenerate their chi, their vital energies, just so long as you
don't take more than that smidgen at one time. You don't have to cut them.
You just touch them. I needed crowds, like at the county fair, for just that
reason. Bump into someone, smile, apologize, and move on. They never knew,
and I was one day farther away from dying young.

I was still robbing them. I knew I was a thief. My father had told me that stealing a
little bit here and there would hurt no one, but I didn't know if it was true,
not in any absolute sense of knowing something. All I had was his word for it.
I would have stopped, really I would have, but oh god, I didn't want to die,
not when I was just barely twenty-two years old! But I did try to take as
little as possible. The temptation, always, was to keep on taking, to swill up
someone else's life like a drunk swills cheap booze, to drink and wallow and
suck until the victim dropped dead at your feet. I had never done it, never
licked up more than that drop or smidgen. When my father told me about our
family disease, I swore that I never would.

So I knew how Tor felt on those crucial three nights a month, the longing and the
temptation to break out of his flat and allow himself to run like the animal he
believed himself to be. That's why I took the job.

“Can you be here Friday?” Tor said. “I never even asked when your classes are.”

“It's just summer school, and I'm only taking the one class, the portrait studio. I had to
work as many days as possible this term just to keep my head above water.”

“You were that desperate?”

“Fraid so. The last three years have absolutely killed my savings and my credit. My cards
are maxed out.”

We agreed that I'd come back to his place the next Friday afternoon, the day that the
moon would enter the dark part of its cycle. Tor wrote down his actual address
and phone number on the back of a business card and gave me some directions,
too, since we'd gotten there in an unorthodox way. He took me back to my place
as promised without the slightest hint of trouble or hassle. At my door we
politely shook hands.

“It's so good to see you again,” he said. “I've missed you.”

 I put his odd way of speaking down to English being his second language. With a little
wave he turned and walked off. At the corner he vanished. I went inside and
locked, bolted, and chained the door after me. After seeing Tor's gorgeous
flat, my own squalor hit me hard. The smell of mildew and damp seemed suddenly
stronger. I prowled around, but I found no evidence of a new leak in the
ceiling, only the gray stains on the sheet rock from the old ones. The people
upstairs threw a lot of water around. I don't know why. Maybe their sinks
leaked, and the damned landlord was too cheap to fix them. I reminded myself
that at least I could afford to pay the rent increase now, and that I wasn't
going to find a better place for the same money.

Normally I worked at the burger joint from three p.m. to ten in the evening, three days a
week in the middle of the week. Thursday night I was just on my way out of the
door when my brother walked in, my older brother, just turned twenty-six that
month. On his good days Roman was a handsome guy, tall, nicely built, with a
thick mop of black hair that he wore cut just above the collar. He had deep-set
dark eyes, regular features, and skin like mine, a deep olive or light tan—you
could call it either way. That night, however, he was unshaven, he smelled
really bad, and his eyes kept flicking this way and that, focusing anywhere but
on me or the night manager.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You want money.”

“I could use some, yeah.” His voice trembled so hard that I knew what he wanted to spend
it on. “I haven't eaten—”

“Don't lie to me!”

I hooked my arm through his and walked him out of the burger joint. In silence we hurried
down to my car, which I'd parked under a streetlight. The neighborhood around
the burger joint called for caution. He shook his arm free of mine and leaned
against the hood of the car.

“I'm not giving you money for drugs,” I said.

He stared at the sidewalk.

“When do you get your next disability check?” I went on.

“Soon.” He kept looking at the cracks in the cement. “It won't be much. They've stopped
letting me have all of it.”

“Good. They pay out of it for that hotel room, huh?”

“Yeah.” He looked up. “Maya, I really am hungry.”

“So am I. Go to Saint Anthony's in the morning.”

“How am I going to get back to the city? Give me a ride?”

“No.” I sighed, I debated, but in the end, I reached into my pocket and brought out my
last five dollar bill. “Will you promise me you'll spend this on BART and not
on drugs?”

“You can't buy enough for five bucks to do any good.”

Which is why I handed it over. I also gave him a ride to the nearest BART station and
watched while he bought a ticket from one of the machines. My brother, my lucky
brother who'd never developed the family disease, the star athlete, always
lucky until he'd joined the Marines and served in the Iraq War. I had no idea
what he'd seen or done there. He never talked about it. He just took every drug
he could get his hands on.

Friday after class, I went home to pack a few things to take to my new job. I did
wonder if I ever should have agreed to it. I was going to spend the weekend
alone with a guy who might be crazy but who definitely could work sorcery. If I
hadn't known my father and seen him study and work—or try to work—magic, I
would never have gone back to Tor's flat. But I had, and I'll admit it, not
only did I really need the money, I was curious as all hell.

When I arrived, Tor had a present for me: a calendar that displayed the lunar phases.

“You'll need this,” he told me, “if you decide to keep working here. Uh, look. Let's
consider this weekend a kind of job try-out. For your sake, I mean. If you
really hate the stuff that happens, I'll understand. You can quit. I'll pay you
for the days you work anyway.”

“That's really generous of you. Okay. Let's see what happens.”

I figured that nothing was going to happen, actually, except maybe he'd see things that
weren't there and I could reassure him.

“You could put your stuff away,” he said. “I'll cook dinner. Do you like fish? Sea bass.”

“That would be wonderful, thanks!”

I'd brought some clean clothes on a hanger and my laptop in my backpack. I also had a couple
of sketchbooks and some Conté sticks for drawing the illusions if they really
did happen to appear. I carried the stuff down the hall to the room that would
be mine on work nights. I set everything onto the bed and opened the brocade
drapes.

 In the golden glow of late afternoon the room looked positively medieval. Well, not
real medieval. Burne-Jones medieval. I would have loved it as a child, and I
liked it even as a grown-up. It had a real coffered ceiling in dark oak. Soft,
thick area rugs in cheerful reds and yellows lay on the hardwood floor. In one
corner stood a real Tiffany floor lamp. The oak furniture also struck me as
genuinely antique, not that I'm an expert in that field. I examined the
carvings on the dresser—a pattern of vines and wild roses right off a William
Morris wallpaper. The pattern on the bedstead matched.

Or at least, when I'd first seen the pieces, I could have sworn that the carvings
matched. In the center of the headboard, however, I found an anthropomorphic
moon-face carved in profile. I took a sketchbook and stick of sepia Conté from
my backpack and drew the motif. The skinny moon-face looked exactly the same in
my drawing as on the headboard—not an illusion, then. I decided that I simply
hadn't noticed it when Tor was showing me the room.

The writing desk was another matter. Under its gazillion coats of black lacquer it might
have been an antique in the Chippendale mode, but someone had first lacquered
it, then used it as a background for the strangest decoupage I'd ever seen.

The artist had meticulously cut all the images out of old-fashioned wood block prints,
then colored them by hand in vivid hues. In the center stood a bright green
lion eating a sun. The sun was bleeding all over the lion's mouth. Around the
lion motif was a circle of flying shrimp—pink shrimp like you'd find in salad,
but with little wings. Fat green caterpillars crawled around the outer edge,
nose to tail, to form a border. The artist must have made photocopies of an
original, I figured, to get the multiple images.

I opened the lid and found, on its underside, a zodiac with a spiky gold sun at the
center, surrounded by small yellow fish laid nose to tail. Pale pink scallop
shells formed the outer border. In one corner, tiny white script read “Liv
Thorlaksdottir,” the artist, I assumed, and I could guess that she was one of
Tor's relatives from her name. She must have spent hundreds of hours on the
piece, so many that I could ignore how ugly it was. Not all women's craft-art
has to be beautiful, you know. Maybe the long painstaking project had kept her
sane during sunless winters in Iceland. The desk was empty. I shut the lid. I'd
been thinking of putting my laptop on it, but I was afraid of marring the
varnished surface

I decided that I needed to make a show of earning my money, whether or not the alleged
illusions showed up. I took the sketchbooks and Conté with me when I left the bedroom
and put them on the coffee table in the living room. I found Tor in the
kitchen, a sunny room with a real slate floor, green appliances, and a big
wooden butcher's block in the middle, where he was slicing tomatoes for salad.
A breakfast bar separated the kitchen from the living room. I offered to help
cook. When he shook his head no, I sat down on a high stool at the bar.

“I like cooking,” Tor said. “Mundane stuff like this keeps me from drifting off
somewhere. That's one of the hazards, y'know, of being a sorcerer. Drifting
off.”

“Guess it would be.”

He gave me a vague nerdy smile. We chatted about this and that—was the room comfortable,
when I did have to leave for class on Monday, that kind of thing. I also asked
him about the writing desk.

“My sister made it for me. It's strange, isn't it? But then, so's she.”

“Ah” was the only reply I could come up with. If he considered her strange—oh man! I
thought. She must really be something.

 “Is she older or younger than you?” I said.

“Three years younger.” He paused, considering. “Almost to the day.”

“Does she live around here?”

“No. She married a man from Iceland and went back there with him. I visited them last
year at Christmas. I don't see how anyone stands the winters. I've been in California too long, I guess, to want to deal with the cold and the dark. Especially the
dark.”

“I've always wondered that myself.”

“I couldn't stay long, anyway. I had to cram the visit in between full moons.”

Up until that point our conversation had been so ordinary that I'd forgotten he claimed
to be a shape-changer. I began to wonder if Tor did indeed suffer from
delusions on that point. Yet my own strange disease reminded me that sometimes
folklore exists for a reason.

My phone rang. I took it out of my shirt pocket and looked at the caller ID: Roman. I
let it play—I'd downloaded a stride piano vamp for a ringtone—until the
answering service took over.

“Who was that?” Tor said.

I saw no reason not to tell him. “My brother.”

“You could have picked up. I wouldn't have minded or anything.”

“Thanks, but you don't understand about my brother.”

He tilted his head to one side and waited, his lips slightly parted, so bear-like a
gesture that I was expecting him to grunt at me like the bears did in the TV
documentaries. I considered, but he really did have the right to know about
Roman.

“Look,” I continued, “I don't want him to know the address here. He's a druggie. They
steal. They can't even help it, I know, but I don't want him near your place,
so I didn't want him asking me where I was.”

“Okay. I appreciate knowing that.”

“All this family talk reminds me of something. Do you have an older relative who lives
around here? Your father, maybe?”