Chapter Eleven

The sound of a door closing woke Donata from a dream that involved Magnus, a shower, a lot of soap, and some giggling. It took her a moment to realize that reality wasn’t nearly as entertaining—that door was him leaving for a long day, she was alone in her comfortable bed, and the first rays of the sun were just beginning to show through the space between the curtains.

Drat.

Donata lay there for a few minutes, hoping sleep would reclaim her. Once it became clear that there was no chance of that happening, she decided to take advantage of the early hour and get the most difficult task of the day out of the way before anyone else was up and around to interrupt her.

She threw on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved cotton top, pulled on her boots, grabbed her leather jacket and a box of supplies, and headed down the hallway to the kitchen. Once there, she cast a wistful look in the direction of the empty coffeepot but kept moving out the back door and through the yard.

The grass was brittle under her boots, and the dawn air was cold and foggy. Late fall in Maine could segue into winter at a moment’s notice, and this morning it felt as though the weather hovered on the cusp. Donata hugged her jacket closer around her and thought that if she was really going to be there until Thanksgiving, she might need to borrow a warmer coat. She had a brief vision of Magnus and her playing with his niece and nephew in front of the fire while a gigantic turkey sent mouthwatering aromas out from the kitchen, but she shrugged off the pleasant notion for the fantasy it was.

For one thing, she hoped to have this situation dealt with long before the holiday. For another, her own mother would have her stuffed and served on a platter if Donata missed the Santori family celebration.

The area behind the sprawling main house was divided up between large patches of garden, now bedded down for the winter; a chicken pen, where a few drowsy hens clucked at her as she walked past; and a number of outbuildings of assorted shapes and sizes. There was a medium-sized barn, used mostly to house vehicles instead of the horses it used to hold, some storage sheds, and a small structure that was sometimes used for rituals and celebrations. When Donata had asked where she might do her magical work without worrying about interruptions, prying eyes, or offending anyone, Astrid had suggested that building.

Pushing open the door with its slightly creaky hinges, Donata saw a mostly empty space with a dirt floor and a fire pit dug in the middle. A few stools were pushed back against the walls along with a couple of long, narrow tables, and a small, cleverly designed hole in the ceiling would allow smoke to escape without letting in too much weather from the outside. There were blackened torches in holders on the walls, but the windows let in enough light she thought she could do without them. The room was chilly but not unbearably so, and once she got a fire going using the logs and kindling stacked against the far wall, it was almost warm. Almost.

Donata unpacked her few supplies with the efficiency of long practice, and arranged them in a circle around the fire pit. She used a compass to tell her which way north was, then placed candles at that spot and the other three cardinal points: east, south, and west. A candle for the goddess went at the space near her feet, along with a vial of purified water, a leather pouch filled with salt, and a sage smudge stick in a miniature cast-iron cauldron. A box of wooden matches, and she was all set. Witchcraft was more about focus and intent than it was about props, although the few tools she used helped her to direct her energy where she needed it.

Walking clockwise around the circle, she sprinkled water to cleanse the space and salt to set the boundaries of the circle and ground her. Then she lit each candle in turn and called in the elemental powers associated with each direction: air for east, fire for south, water for west, and finally earth for north. Then she lit the large black candle that symbolized Hecate, and invoked the goddess.

“Join me in this sacred space, Hecate, goddess of Witches, and lend me your strength and protection.” The candle sputtered and then flared up, as if in answer.

After the circle was cast and all else was in readiness, Donata lit the sage wand and set it inside its iron container in front of the fire. Smoke from the sage mixed with that from the fire pit to create a column of haze that swirled and danced in the air.

Donata raised her hands and focused all her will on summoning the ghost of Freddy’s brother. She had decided on him because she knew he had already appeared once, and she hoped he would still be in the area, caught by whatever had brought him there in the first place.

“Samuel Nordstrom, I summon you. Attend me here in this sacred circle. In the name of Odin, who you worship, I call on you to come in peace and tell me what I need to know.”

The smoke from the sage billowed up, becoming white and thick and scenting the air with its sweet, acrid odor. Normally, this would be the point in the ritual where the ghost would manifest, an echo of the physical body taking temporary form in the swirls of smoke. But something wasn’t right.

First the white smoke turned gray, then black, then back to gray again. Then it flew up to the ceiling and out toward the windows, as if trying to escape. Donata thought she heard the faint sound of screams, or maybe calls for help, and then the sage wand simply went out, leaving her standing in front of a slowly diminishing fire whose flames told her nothing at all.

Head spinning and stomach roiling, Donata quenched the remains of the fire and then gathered up her supplies with clumsy fingers, dropping the vial of water three times before she finally was able to stuff it back into the box she’d brought it in. The last time she’d almost left it lying there, and only the thought that it wasn’t her space made her reach for the tiny bottle again.

Something had clearly gone wrong with her spell, but she had no idea what. She’d never had magical work rebound on her this way, although she’d had her fair share of spectacular failures when she was practicing new spells.

This was different, though. Her body felt discombobulated, as if bits and pieces of her might go floating off in different directions at any time. Stumbling down the pathway back to the house, her stomach heaved and she had to stop abruptly and vomit into some bushes. She knelt there for a minute, sweaty and shaking, before pushing herself to her feet and making her way to the back door and into the warm kitchen.

Grateful that the room was abandoned for the moment, she rinsed out her mouth at the sink and patted her face with a dish towel. Only when she began to feel somewhat normal again did she notice the signs of breakfast preparations that seemed to have been disrupted before they could be finished. A bowl of eggs only partially scrambled, with a still-dripping fork lying on the counter next to it. The coffeepot on the stove, starting to boil over. Bread sliced for toast, sitting abandoned next to a crock of butter. Donata grabbed an oven mitt and rescued the coffee, then looked around for signs of life. She couldn’t imagine Astrid leaving the kitchen like this unless something had gone seriously wrong. Was one of the kids hurt? Had something happened to Magnus?

Donata’s heart, which had finally started to resume its regular rhythm after her magical misadventures, skipped a beat.

The sound of voices made her straighten up and do her best to appear normal. The effort was wasted, though, since when Astrid entered the kitchen, she barely glanced at Donata, other than to nod gratefully at the coffeepot.

“I’m sorry,” Astrid said, fumbling with the strings of the apron around her waist. “There’s been an accident. I need to go into Masonville, to the hospital. Help yourself to whatever you want for breakfast. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.” The normally composed woman was pale, and her fingers shook a little as she tossed the apron onto a nearby stool.

“Is it Magnus?” Donata said through lips that had gone numb. “Is he going to be okay?”

Astrid looked up, seeming to take in Donata’s presence fully for the first time. “Oh, honey, Magnus is just fine. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to panic you.” She closed the distance between them and gave Donata a brief, strong hug.

“Oh. That’s good.” All the air whooshed out of Donata’s lungs, leaving her light-headed. “I mean, it’s good that he’s okay. Who is hurt then?”

“One of the other Ulf candidates,” Astrid said. “A girl—woman, really—named Lora. I assisted at her birth, babysat her when she was little. Her father is in the military and her mother was a firefighter before we lost her, about five years back. Lora spent almost as much time eating at this table as she did at home. She’s practically part of the family.” Astrid bit her lip, fighting back tears. “I just got a message from one of the other trainees that Lora was hurt in today’s testing. He didn’t have a lot of details. Just said she was distracted by something while they were moving through the treetops, and fell. Said she landed badly, and they had to take her into Masonville. I’m heading there now.”

Donata thought quickly. She needed to go into town to call her great-aunt Tatiana for some magical advice. And although Astrid could usually have arm-wrestled a giant in the middle of a tornado, Donata could see that the older woman was really rattled.

“Would you like me to drive?” she asked. “I was going to ask for a ride into Masonville at some point today anyway.”

Astrid didn’t even ask why. “That would be lovely, dear, although I could do it myself. Kari was going to come back after taking the children to school, but I’d just as soon not wait.”

“Of course not,” Donata said, and went to grab her bag.

The hospital stank of astringent cleansers and the sour scent of illness. Its pale green walls and linoleum floors could have belonged to a medical facility anywhere, although its small size set it apart from any hospital Donata had ever been in before. A tired-looking nurse with a pen stuck through her graying bun pointed them in the direction of a curtained section of the emergency room after Astrid said they were family.

“One advantage of most of us being tall and blond,” she said with a small laugh. “Nobody ever questions the family claim.”

Donata smiled at her. “I guess your folks end up in the hospital a lot, considering the kind of risks they take.” She couldn’t really criticize, since she was a cop, although it wasn’t as though her work brought her into the line of fire. At least, it hadn’t until she’d stumbled across that damned painting.

“Oh, not really. We’re not much for doctors and such. Mostly we have our own healers and depend on the fact that our bodies can take a lot of punishment. But sometimes there are things like this that are beyond our skills. I suppose we’re here often enough that the folks who work here can recognize someone from Gimle when they see them.” Astrid stopped in front of the curtain and took a deep breath, a look of deliberate calm replacing the one of worry as she stepped through, tugging Donata with her when she hesitated.

The first thing Donata saw was Magnus, looming over the bed in a once-tan tee shirt now soaked with a red wetness that made the shirt cling to his abs. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, but then her brain caught up with her eyes and she realized that the blood wasn’t his. It must have come from the woman lying in the cubicle, since there was a stark white bandage taped to her forehead. Head wounds bled like crazy.

“Hey,” Donata said as Astrid moved to stand next to her son, squeezing his hand once before turning her attention to Lora.

“Hey yourself,” Magnus said. “Thanks for coming.”

“What happened?” Astrid asked in a quiet voice. Various machines beeped and hummed throughout the small emergency room, and the curtains around their space further muffled their voices, but she clearly didn’t want anyone else to overhear Ulfhednar business. “All I heard was that she fell.”

“And something about you being in the treetops,” Donata added. “Could that have been right?”

Magnus gave her a tight smile. “Yes, today’s test involved moving through the forest without ever touching your feet to the ground. It’s a guerrilla-warfare thing. Very useful in some situations. Also a lot of fun, most of the time.” He looked down at his friend. “Not this time.”

“Do you know if she saw a . . . saw something, like the others did?” Donata asked.

“No one is really sure what happened, although I’d bet on it, since she tends to be better at this exercise than anyone else, even me. But she’s been unconscious since we brought her in.”

“We used to call her ‘little monkey,’” Astrid said in a sad voice. “When she was young, it seemed as though she was always perched in a tree somewhere.”

A white-coated doctor came into the room, a tiny woman with short dark hair and a no-nonsense attitude. She glanced from the clipboard in her hand to the patient in the bed and then at the three of them.

“I’m Dr. Lee. You’re the family?” she asked, then continued talking without waiting for an answer. “Lora’s vitals are stable and she seems to be out of danger for now, but we’ll be admitting her as soon as they can get a bed ready.”

“Is she going to be okay?” Magnus asked.

The doctor looked down at the chart. “It is too soon to say. The gash on her head looks worse than it is, but she has a concussion and hasn’t regained consciousness since she took her fall. That’s not that unusual, and hopefully she’ll wake up soon. But the longer it takes, the more concerned we’ll be about possible brain damage.”

She glanced at Astrid and tightened her lips, maybe assuming the taller woman was Lora’s mother. “I’m afraid her other injuries are also quite serious. She broke her back in three places and has a couple of cracked ribs as well as a fractured right ankle. To be honest, I’m amazed that her vital signs are as strong as they are, considering the extent of the damage. She’s clearly a tough young woman. Time will tell. You’re welcome to wait around until they move her upstairs, but there isn’t likely to be any change in the next few hours. If you’d like to go home, I can have one of the nurses call you when she wakes up.” The if was unspoken.

“Thank you, Doctor, but we’ll stay,” Astrid said.

A brisk nod was all the response she got as the doctor hurried out to deal with her next patient.

Donata took a few steps closer so she was standing on the opposite side of the bed. “Can she heal from those kinds of wounds?” she asked quietly.

Magnus shrugged, the skin on his face looking tight and pale. “Like the doctor said, only time will tell. The ribs and ankle should be fine, as long as they were relatively clean breaks. The back . . . maybe, maybe not. But the doctor was right about one thing: Lora is tough. If anyone can bounce back from this, she can.” He winced. “Maybe I should have used a word other than ‘bounce.’”

His mother patted him on the arm, and the tiny lines around his eyes relaxed a little.

Eventually a couple of orderlies bustled into the cubicle and transferred Lora’s inert body efficiently onto a gurney, trailing the IV pole along behind them like a bobbing fishing lure. Magnus, Astrid, and Donata followed, reminding Donata irreverently of a mother duck and her ducklings.

On the other end of the trip, Lora was placed in a bed and hooked up to monitors that beeped periodically with their own unmusical rhythm. A nurse popped her head in briefly and took Lora’s vitals again, nodded at the three of them, then popped back out without ever bothering to introduce herself.

Donata hated hospitals.

Astrid bustled off to find some coffee, and Donata pulled up a chair to sit next to Magnus by Lora’s bedside.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, putting one hand gently on his arm. “Why don’t you give me your shirt and I’ll try to rinse some of that blood out of it in the bathroom. It will still be damp, but at least it won’t be quite as gory. Or would you rather I went out into town and tried to find you a new one?”

Magnus shifted his gaze from the bed to her, seeming to take her in fully for the first time since they’d gotten there. “Never mind about the shirt. It’s not bothering me. I’d rather you stayed.” He peered at her more closely. “Are you okay, ’Nata? You look terrible. I promise none of this blood is mine.”

She gave a shaky laugh. “I know. I figured that out pretty quickly, although it was quite the shock at first. I just had a rough morning, that’s all.” She glanced down at Lora. “Not as rough as yours, obviously.”

“What happened? I thought you were going to try and summon Freddy’s brother. Didn’t it go well?”

Donata’s stomach flip-flopped at the memory and she swallowed hard, breathing through her nose. That was a mistake, since the sharp smell of the hand sanitizer the nurse had used mixed with the general scents of fear and sickness and made acid rise up in the base of her throat.

She shook it off the best she could, trying to focus on Magnus instead of herself. “That’s an understatement. Not only did it not work, it all went kind of sidewise. I don’t really know a better way to explain it. I’ve never had anything like that happen before. I’ve blown stuff up and set things on fire, and I’ve had plain old nothing happen, but this . . . this was different. Off, somehow. And it made me feel kind of sick. I’m okay, though. Just confused and frustrated.”

Magnus reached out and held on to Lora’s hand. “I know exactly what you mean. So I take it we’re not any closer to figuring out how to stop this from happening again.”

Donata shook her head, wanting to kick herself for letting him down. “No, I’m sorry. I’ll keep trying. I’m going to call my great-aunt Tatiana in a little while and see if she has any ideas. She knows more about magic than anyone else I’ve ever met.”

She looked at the still form lying in the bed. Under normal circumstances, she would have offered to try some healing on the woman. Although that talent was more her sister’s specialty, all Witches could do at least some basic healing work, drawing on the universal energy around them. But considering how badly things had gone earlier, Donata didn’t think it was worth taking the chance that something might go wrong.

“I just got a message from the elders,” Astrid said, walking into the room with three cardboard coffee cups held in her hands. “They’re calling a meeting tonight and they want us all there. They’ve stopped the trials for the day, so you’re not missing anything, Magnus.” Her light-colored brows were drawn together in concern.

“Well, that’s good, anyway,” Magnus said.

“Not necessarily,” Astrid said. “They’re talking about stopping them altogether this year. And we’re going to have to convince them not to.”