Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
That night, the dream came again, the heat of Orabilia’s power coursing through me.
It was as if the coins, the stolen art, and my brother wandering into my life thinking I was in a cult kept stirring it back up.
I sat up gasping. I made sure Rowan wasn’t hovering in midair.
Again I went to the open window. Cool night air caressed my superheated skin.
I gripped the windowsill as I heard, from behind me, Rowan turn over and, in a low voice, call over to me, “Ye all right, mo ghràdh?”
I could only nod. I had no idea if I was all right. Seeing her over and over again made my body shake in fear, especially if she brought him back. It felt as if something were escalating. Again.
I looked down at my hands. Were they still glowing? They weren’t, but they felt hot.
I heard Rowan’s feet pad along the floor before he was gently pressing against my back and pulling me into his embrace. His naked skin was warm against my back through my T-shirt, and the soft touch of his fingers as he brushed damp ringlets off my neck was soothing to my freaked-out mind.
“Nightmare again?” His low voice warmed my shoulder before he kissed it.
I could only nod again.
He held me tight around my middle, and I gripped his arms in return, leaning back into him like the refuge he was. I was a ship caught up in a midnight gale, and he, the calm port, stilled me.
I closed my eyes and whispered, “It feels like chaos in here,” and tapped the side of my head. Then I added, “Feels like a bit of Ormr was left behind.”
“Mmm.”
“I hate it.”
He gave my neck a sleepy kiss. “The chaos has a few names.”
I turned to face him, staying within the circle of his arms. “No, I don’t want it… No, thank you.”
He gave me a sad smile. “Aye, we don’t get asked if we want it, do we?
We’re just given it through our experiences, and then we must figure out how to quiet our minds so we can do basic things again.
” He paused, thinking. “Mine is called PTSD, and it can wreak havoc on my consciousness. Like a smelly, twelve-hundred-pound sow ye have to take everywhere, and she tries to run amok in the most inconvenient times. And just when ye think, Oh aye, fine, go, run off! ye realize she’s tied to your ankle.
And she drags ye through her rompings, out of control.
She especially waits to cause chaos when I’m my most tired. Her favorite is when I sleep.”
“Yeah… Well, I can stop sleeping,” I whispered like a fool.
Rowan kissed my temple. “Ye can’t.”
“I don’t like feeling like any moment is a fight-or-flight moment. How do I turn it off?”
“That’s ye minding your sow. You have to find a way to get her to be happy, fed, exercised, and safe so she doesn’t run wild. And eventually, ye can leave her grazing in the forest.”
I thought of his pig, fat and happy in the cool of the woods. “Is that where yours is?”
“Och, no. She’s rummaging through the fridge. A Viking recently inhabited you with the strength of the Hulk, and when ye came down that hillside in that silk gala dress, my sow came tearing back to me from the woods.”
I gave him a sad face. “She was happy there.”
“Aye.” He tucked a group of my ringlets behind my ear. “But what ye’ll come to find out is that she’s devoted to you and charges back home when things aren’t right. She’s a protector, but when she’s done protecting, she has difficulty remembering to head back to the forest.”
“So she eats out of the fridge?”
“Well, mine doesn’t want to go too far, but she’s also a pig and hungry, so, aye, she’s in the fridge eating the cornbread you made and listening to our conversation.”
“Nosy pig.” I smiled against his lips before kissing him.
He asked, “Where would yours be right now?”
My answer made him laugh.
“She’s taken one look at my situation, jumped in a boat, and is rowing for all she’s worth back to South Carolina.”
Knowing it would be another sleepless night, with Orabilia snaking across my skin, I thought how I’d like to see the field in the moonlight.
I slipped from the bed, leaving Rowan safe and asleep.
I put my wellies and a heavy sweater on and walked up to the cairn knoll.
There on the hill, I paused by each of the rock piles marking the dead souls that had risen up to fight us.
Despite their aggression, they were to be pitied.
They had only been doing as they were commanded by my Viking grandfather and his Ulfberht sword.
Then Rowan’s grandmother, Orabilia, sent them off this astral plane and into their dream world, Valhalla.
The power that woman wielded was something I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see again, and yet I had seen it twice.
During the battle, she’d sucked the life right out of the soil beneath my boots to send my ancestral grandpappy, his crew, and herself into the afterlife.
How did that affect the field? Did it at all? I still didn’t know.
We had taken soil samples and sent them off for analysis, and I had rehydrated some in a petri dish.
But I could see nothing in it under the microscope.
Pool water had more bacteria than the slide I’d looked at.
I made a mash of soil and distilled water, spread it on agar in a petri dish, and sealed it up.
Days later, still nothing had grown. It was as if I’d squirted hand sanitizer into the petri dish and not what should have been microbe-laden, fertile soil.
Holly and I had bantered about why the soil was inert.
I had commented, “It’s as if even the microorganisms were killed, but more than that, new bacteria and yeast aren’t growing. So whatever is left in the soil isn’t bioavailable to the microorganisms that land on it.”
“Or it’s poisoned? Radioactive?”
I had wondered that too. “I have a little radiation meter I kept from grad school when we were working around the Hanford nuclear site. I took it out to the field, and it registered regular levels, only as much as the sun creates. That’s it.”
“So, poisoned, then?”
“I’ve got a sample off at the labs. We’ll check for heavy metals and common poisons, but this event was supernatural. I think we both have an inkling of why it’s not growing.”
“Cursed,” she had said before stuffing an impressive amount of one of Marion’s strawberry scones, reserved for paying guests, into her face.
“Something like that.”
Around her bite, she said, “Best go talk with your granny.”
Supernatural event aside, I had the sinking realization that it would take quite a bit of verbal gymnastics to update the Fund with my current findings about the field and also keep our research grants.
I planned to delay by instead giving them salacious details about Mickey Gillian.
In the meantime, the students were occupied on the fallen tree that had had its tip scorched; it had enough biological interest below the scorch line to keep them busy until fall term began in another month.
But the Fund’s inevitable inquiry weighed on me.
Many of the students had joined us in the battle.
It was a bonding moment for us all. Of those who’d received Rowan’s call, most had cuts on their cheeks or knuckles; some were still limping.
It was the MacLaoch way: to wake up the next morning and set to task no matter what happened the night before.
I’d given them time off while I was away with Rowan at the hospital, but Marion said they showed up anyway.
Now, on the cairn knoll, illuminated by moonlight, I held out my hands and looked at them, remembering my dream. Would the field make them glow, or did I need my hands to glow to make the field regrow?
“It’s fucking cold out here, Pipsqueak.”
I turned at the sound of my brother’s voice. He was in a heavy, drab-olive, military-issue coat that had been our dad’s until Tee enlisted. It had that worn-since-the-sixties feel, the soft comfort of a father’s hug. I had one of Daddy’s old field coats; I was familiar.
“You’re back. Where you been hiding?”
“What are you doing out here?”
TJ was dodging the question, but I let it go because I was just glad to see him.
“Taking in the beauty,” I said, extending my arm to encompass all the dead char. “What are you doing out here? It’s midnight.”
“It’s six back home.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
But he’d come from Germany, only an hour’s difference from here, another point I didn’t press.
He came to stand next to me, blowing into his hands to stave off the evening’s wet chill. “Wanna talk?”
“Please, no.”
“So you’re fine?”
“Yup.”
“Totally fine?”
“Hundred percent.”
“This isn’t the aftereffect of a Viking dude taking up in your body and giving you nightmares?”
I blew out a breath to try not to feel in my memory Orabilia electrocuting me.
“You know,” he said, “I distinctly remember you holding me back home after what I experienced, as I scream-cried.”
I remembered too. In the middle of our family’s peach orchard several years back TJ recounted a moment from the seemingly infinite number of moments he’d had in his years as an army medic one that had hit him hard.
There’d been two men, a downed plane, blood was everywhere.
They scooped one man out of the sand and put him directly into a body bag.
The other lived only to die later. TJ had yelled and screamed as he’d relived it, sweated it out in the South Carolina heat, then collapsed in a heap sobbing from the horrors of it.
We cried together that day. I walked alongside him within his darkness, and we dealt with it together.
Darkness was like that; it was easier with a friend.
“Yeah, well, I’m at the scream part. I’m trying to put Ormr into a box and move on…”
“But?”
“My brain keeps remembering this one moment. It’s almost like it wants me never to forget, not even for a second, and always be on guard. It’s exhausting.”
“The stabby part?”
“Yeah.”