Page 44 of Witches of Dubious Origin
Was that what the scuffling had been about? Had the raven been trying to warn me? I drew in a shaky breath. Was the poor bird dead because of me? As I stared, the bird’s eye opened, meeting my gaze. I didn’t hesitate. With a panicked cry that probably sounded like a rabbit screeching, I lifted the poker over my head and charged out of the shadows, straight at the strange man. He flung the bird away as I brought the poker down with all my might. I saw the bird fly out the broken door, but I couldn’t spare a second for relief. The man blocked my strike with a forearm and the impact sent reverberations up my arms.
The man bellowed at me and I yelped and darted away,putting the sofa between us. He spoke in a language I didn’t understand. The words sounded Scandinavian but not like any Swedish or Norwegian I had ever heard. He stomped forward and I took in his muscled arms and strange clothes. His dark blond hair was cut in a fringe that fell over his eyes but was short in the back in a sort of reverse mullet, and his beard was thick but neatly trimmed. He looked like he’d just escaped a Renaissance festival via Sweden.
He balled his hands into fists and bellowed, “Bók!”
That word I knew. It was Old Norse forbook. My heart was pounding in my chest as my mind raced. Out went my first inclination—that he was here to commit sexual assault and murder. As a single woman who lived alone and watched entirely too much true crime, that was the first place my brain went. But the wordbókwas a big tell, and I knew the only book I had of any interest to anyone was my family’s grimoire.
He looked past me at my bookcase. He strode forward and I ran around the sofa, keeping it between us. He began to snatch books off the shelves, turning them over in his hands and then hurling them to the ground with enough force to crack their spines.
“Hey!” I cried. It was one thing to barge into my house and terrify me with the threat of bodily harm, but going after my books…well, now we had a problem. As my childhood copy ofAnne of Green Gablesflew past my head, I didn’t think—I reacted. I lunged forward and brought the iron poker down on his shoulder. He went still.
I backed up, realizing two things simultaneously. First, hewas massive and the top of my head barely reached his shoulders. Second, I was an idiot.
He turned slowly to face me. The intense light in his brown eyes flared through the fringe of hair that covered his forehead and blasted me like a winter wind. I stood frozen in place, overly aware of my faux lambskin–lined slippers, flannel pajama bottoms, and thermal top. These were not fighting clothes. His upper lip curled and terror turned my legs into useless noodles. I watched as he reached forward and plucked the poker out of my hand as if it were no more substantial than a freshly cut flower. He flung it across the room and I heard it smash something. I dared not look behind me even as I fervently hoped it wasn’t my coffee maker. Then he leaned forward until his face was just inches from mine and he bellowed, “Bók!”
The stench of his breath gave me my first inkling that I was not dealing with some random person who happened to be scouring my house for the Donadieu family’s magical textbook. No, this man’s breath smelled like death and I had to swallow against the gag reflex that kicked in as the fetid stench washed over me in a nose-wrinkling, vomit-inducing, malodorous fug.
I knew in that moment that no matter what, I couldn’t let him get his big beefy meat hooks on the grimoire. I glanced around the room, frantically searching for a weapon. This was where my minimalist decor was detrimental. There was not even one decorative tchotchke to be weaponized. Damn it!
I grabbed a throw pillow and hurled it at him. He swatted it away as if it were a pesky fly. I used his distraction to bendlow and snatch up the grimoire with one hand while I grabbed another pillow with the other. I was about to hurl it right in his face when an arm looped about my waist and hauled me backward toward the door.
“A pillow fight? That’s your go-to when a deranged Viking breaks into your house?”
I whipped my head around to find Jasper behind me. He was winded and disheveled, as if he had run all the way from New York. I was about to ask him what he was doing there when my uninvited dead guest raised his arms and shook his fists in peak frustration. Then he saw the book in my hand.
He advanced on us while he roared, “Bók!”
“How’s your cardio?” Jasper released my waist and grabbed my free hand in his.
“Terrible.” It didn’t feel like an appropriate time to lie.
“That’s a shame because we need to run. Now!”
Jasper dragged me through the open half of the door, down the steps and walkway, to the street. I glanced back once to see undead Erik the Red ripping the remaining half of my door off its hinges and throwing it across my lawn. How was I ever going to explain this to the neighbors?
“Let’s go, love, knees to chest!” Jasper ordered. He didn’t have to tell me twice.
I matched my stride to his, which was long, and we bolted down the street, putting distance between us and the undead Viking, who had just started running—as if he had forgotten how and it was taking him a moment to get all the parts in working order.
“Is there a cemetery nearby?” Jasper panted.
I scanned my rattled brain. “Yes. A quarter of a mile fromhere, around the corner to the left. Why?” The absolute last place I wanted to go right now was a graveyard, as I felt it would be a bit too convenient for our pursuer to end us there.
“We’re going to lead Hairy, Scary, and Dead into a tomb and bind him there until you learn how to send him back to the afterlife,” Jasper said. The street was empty, as if the residents knew better than to venture outside with an undead Viking on the loose.
“Bind him in a tomb?” The words hissed out of my mouth as my lungs started to burn. “There’s no other way to get rid of him?”
“We could try to light him on fire and let him burn to ash, but it smells ghastly and it’s quite messy. Also, he might still come back,” Jasper said.
“Tomb it is!” I sprinted around the corner, hoping my inappropriate footwear of fuzzy slippers didn’t disintegrate before we got there.
My relief when I saw Eternal Shade Cemetery up ahead was short-lived, as I could hear the Viking’s feet pounding the ground behind us. When I went to look, Jasper ordered, “Don’t turn around. Focus on finding an accessible mausoleum.”
“I know which one we can use,” I panted. Then I hoped Agatha would forgive me for sticking an undead Viking in the Lively family tomb. “We need to get to the top of the hill and go to the largest family mausoleum.”
“Lead on,” Jasper grunted, and gestured with his hand.
The pavement became a dirt road as we turned into the cemetery. The headstones were barely illuminated by the light of the quarter moon, but that was fine. I knew exactly where I was going.
