Natural Consequences (42 page)

“Yeah, I’m a little…” Amber’s voice trailed off. “Is it just me, or did he want me out of the room? And did you think it was weird that he brought up the possibility of Jason getting out of trouble on a plea deal?”

At that, Colleen turned back to her. “You may not be right for undercover work,” she said, “but don’t start drafting your resignation letter just yet.”

*   *   *

Magic, as it turned out, involved
an awful lot of running around buying stuff.

It seemed they went to every florist in town,
picking up dozens of lilies and as many of the darkest roses they could find. They bought wine and whiskey and sake. They went to a cemetery on the north end of the city and bought from the groundskeepers a couple of the small American flags sold for the graves of veterans on patriotic holidays. After two fruitless stops, they found a coin dealer whose wares satisfied Molly, and there they bought three silver coins.

Alex paid for it all.

“There are rules against working magic strictly for profit,” Molly explained at one point in their drive. “Sometimes it’s okay and sometimes it’s not. Last night with your apartment? That’s fine. Lorelei came to us offering payment of her own volition. We tried to turn down her money and do it for free. She insisted. We went back and forth with that three times, and she knew to keep pushing until we said yes. She doesn’t practice our kind of magic, but she knows the customs. That’s why it was okay to let her pay us. This situation is different.”

“How so?” he asked. He sat in the back seat of Molly’s car, with Onyx riding shotgun. “I don’t want to rip you off.”

“You’re not,” said Onyx, looking back at him. “Don’t try to argue that, either. It’s not fair now. We told you how it works, so that’d be a dodge. We can’t charge you for magic now.”

He cocked his head curiously. “Ever?”

“Pretty much,” Onyx nodded. “Wouldn’t anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re a thing now.” She looked him in the eye as she said it, letting it sink in and smiling a bit. “It may be too early for labels, but we’re a circle of one sort or another. You’d come running if we ever needed help, right?”

“I haven’t come to your rescue ever,” he pointed out. “This isn’t the first time for you, though.”

“It’ll come,” chuckled Molly. “Besides, do you and the guys keep score?”

“Point,” Alex nodded. “But it’s okay for me to pay for the materials?”

“That’s kind of a requirement in this situation,” said Molly. “You’re gonna do a lot of the set-up grunt work on this, too. It’ll mean more that way. This is kind of all about you paying back what you owe.”

He frowned a bit. “Y’know,
from what memories I’ve got, and from my dreams and all that… I don’t feel like I owe anyone anything.” He paused. “Except for maybe a couple of apologies.”

“It’s not like that,” Molly told him. “You didn’t borrow or steal anything from anyone; the people who put you in this condition did that. But the way to resolv
e your problem involves paying back the guy they stole it from. Remember, magic is all about symbolism. What you see and what we do isn’t necessarily how death and the afterlife actually work; it’s just symbols we understand. Anyway, who do you owe apologies?”

“I don’t remember a whole lot,” he said. “Just snippets. Sometimes I think I mix up the names, and sometimes I wonder if I’m not just making stuff up.
I can’t always tell what’s an actual memory and what’s… I dunno, something I saw on television once.” He paused. “Every time I get talking about this stuff, I worry that I’m droning. Plus it’s all kind of sad.”

Onyx stayed twisted in her seat so she could keep her eyes on him. “Talk,” she told him, more as an invitation than an order.

He nodded, looking out the window as they drove. “I think there was a lady named Siobhan that I was in love with,” he said. “I think I said some shitty things to her, and she left me… and I think I never had a chance to say I was so sorry.”

*   *   *

It was much as Molly warned him. He did a lot of grunt work.

The first tasks were simple, such as sweeping
the bare concrete of the ritual room in their small two-bedroom apartment. He poured rosemary into four small mortars, each of them placed at the four cardinal directions—conveniently marked out by tacks placed in the ceiling. Given the positioning of the building, the directions were a bit counterintuitive, but none of the architects had considered calling the corners when they designed the apartment.

When he was done,
Onyx lit the rosemary with a long match and murmured words in a language he almost thought he knew, but couldn’t identify. She came over to him and softly said, “Remember everything you can. Don’t fight it and don’t think about your life now. Think about your life
then
, and how you died. Try to remember names. Your names, other names. Lovers, friends, enemies. Write them on the concrete, outside the circle. It’s okay if it hurts. It’s okay if you get mad or if you cry. You need to grieve… and it’s okay to grieve for yourself.”

She kissed him on the cheek and then left him alone, closing the door
behind her. They had studying and planning to do, they had said. The grunt work was all about him.

He picked the petals
off the bouquets of roses and lilies, using them to completely cover the outer ring of a circle that looked like it had been etched into the foundation concrete with a Dremmel tool. It was painstaking work and murder on his knees.

At first he thought little of his fragmented memories of past lives. Too much of the present occupied his mind, with monsters hunting for him and two lovers from very different worlds all working to share one another and find balance. Onyx was
only a year or two older than he, and Molly only a couple of years beyond her; to be in this apartment that they paid for themselves made him think of his lost job and his dependence on his lover’s wealth.

Eventually, though, the memories came. It was the pain in his knees that took hold first, reminding him of
calisthenics on hard concrete. He remembered basic training, which took different turns and different shapes as two lives who’d served in the same Army blended together and pulled apart. One ended bitterly, in a jungle after an act of sacrifice, buying time for one comrade who stuck with him through thick and thin and another who’d just as soon have spit on him as talk to him. The other ended on a spring day, on his back, looking at the sky with an old woman holding his hand as he bled out, thinking of the woman who’d been his wife for only a handful of months, and most of those spent miles apart.

The first tear fell.

He stopped, found a pencil, and wrote “Marie” outside the circle. Then he got back to work on the petals.

The longer he breathed in the scent of burning rosemary, the easier the memories came. They remained a jumble, never complete and often without context or even a specific emotion. His tears were not constant.

He wrote “Aidan” and “Tinney” and “Chelsea,” unsure of who was who. He got back to work for only a moment, and then stopped again and wrote something else in very different letters.

Then he wrote more
. Foreign letters came to him naturally. He remembered people being surprised that a goatherd could write. He’d gotten that all his adult life, short though it was. He remembered some of the people who’d laughed at his runes, and tried to carve their names into the flat, bare stone.

The pencil broke.

Molly and Onyx found him on his knees, staring furiously at the markings. His arms shook with rage. The two shared a wary glance, both amazed at the scrawlings all over the floor. Most weren’t in English at all.

They took to his sides, crouching down to his l
evel. “Those are Viking runes, aren’t they?” asked Molly, her voice low and gentle. She didn’t understand his response, which came through gritted teeth in a language she’d never heard. The two witches shared another look before she asked, “What does that say?”

“Skorri.”

“Who is Skorri?”

Again, his first response didn’t sound like English.
He swallowed. “Me.”

“Who are they?” she asked, pointing to the last runes he had drawn.

“Unferth,” he grunted, pointing at one and then the other. “Bjorn.” He took a deep, shaking breath. “I’ll have their heads.”

Onyx put her hand on his back. “They’re gone, Alex. Maybe a thousand years gone.”

“No. I saw them last night,” he growled. He looked over at Onyx, staring at her until recognition crept back into his eyes. “I saw them. With the vampires.”

“Wow,” Molly blinked. “What’re the odds?”

“Do you remember them being vampires before?” Onyx asked.

“No. No, they were… they were on my side. Mostly.” His voice became normal once more, though the anger remained. “Oarmates? Is that a word? Or is that from a book? It’s hard to remember little stuff.”

“What’s the big picture, then?” Molly asked. “Why do they have to die? Other than being vampires, right? It sounds personal.”

He nodded, and stared at the
ir names. “They left me to die. They sailed without me. Left me with the… with the Danes, for a whole winter. We were on a raid, and it went bad and we had to flee. They got to the boats before I did and left me. I could’ve died. I should have died. I made it through the winter and found… I found my wife carried another man’s child.

“He cast her out. I took her in, but there was… shame for her. Men scorned me as weak
for taking her back. We left for another village, and… and she was murdered there. I avenged her… yet none of that would have happened to her but for Unferth and Bjorn.”

“Alex,” said Onyx, placing a hand on his cheek. “You don’t seem to me like the type to get hung up on revenge.”

“What are you—of
course
, I want revenge, I—what did you call me?”

“Alex,” she repeated. “You’re Alex.”

He stared at her, then closed his eyes and let out a shuddering breath. “I feel a little freaked out by this.”

“Yeah, I would be, too,”
Molly agreed. “It’s okay. You need to
feel
everything.”

“What’s happening?”

“You need to grieve,” Onyx told him. “You need to mourn, and face all this baggage from all these lives, and then you need to let it go.”

“Will I forget everything?”

“A lot of it,” she nodded. “This is all a part of you. It’s who you are, deep down. But you won’t feel it so much, and that’s what hurts you and confuses you. It’s not the memories, right? It’s the emotions.”

“Don’t the memories cause the emotions?”

“They won’t once you’re ready to let them go.”

“Why can’t I just forget it all?”

“Because you need it, Alex. Because this,” she said, pointing to the runes, “all this is you. Skorri is you, but you’re not living that life anymore.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier?”

“We talked about this when we came up with this plan,” continued Onyx, taking his hand. “You’re a great guy with a big heart and we like you that way. We like you a lot. But your life is
crazy
, Alex. You grew up in a stable home and a nice, safe city, and now you live in a world with monsters.

“Part of you shot and stabbed your way out of a house full of monsters once, Alex,” she said, looking him in the eye. “You
need
that part. It saved your life twice now. Grieving isn’t about forgetting. It’s about releasing emotions and moving on.”

Molly took his other hand. “Hold still,” she instructed as she produced a marker. She wrote on his hand, painstakingly copying the runes that spelled out his name in Old Norse.

“The circle isn’t done yet,” she said, “but I think we can help you with the rest.”

He knew this would be weird. He trusted the women who brought him here and who told him what he needed to do. He desperately wanted his nightmares and all of his nameless heartache laid to rest. But it was still weird.

Alex lay in the center of the ritual circle, still inhaling the rosemary smoke. He felt cold, given the bare concrete underneath him and the lack of a shirt or shoes. His companions sat inside the circle with him, one at his feet and one at his head, both chanting something he could almost recognize. He couldn’t see either of them, or anything else. His eyes were covered by two of the silver coins they’d bought that morning.
He held the third in his mouth.

He needed the
coins, they said, to pay off the boatman—with interest.

The words they chanted seemed so familiar. Alex had scraped through two years of Spanish in high school. That was the extent of his foreign language skills. Yet listening to the witches, he could swear he knew half of those words. They used words like “love” and “death” and “memory” and “obols,” which he knew to mean “coin” but had never heard or used in his life.

These weren’t proper obols. They weren’t even close. He knew that, too, and had a clear idea of what an obol should look like. These were silver coins, and maybe that was close enough for sorcery, but they weren’t actually obols.