Thief Eyes

Chapter 12

I grabbed the phone. “Jared?”

“Haley? Oh God, is it really you?”

My stomach did a little flip at the sound of Jared’s voice. “Yeah, it’s me.” I sat down, right at the side of the road, because I suddenly didn’t trust my legs to hold me up. Ari sat down beside me, keeping a careful distance.

“You can hear me,” I said into the phone. Speaking English felt strange.

“Of course I can hear you. Haley, where on earth have you—” Jared’s voice rose, caught. “We thought you were dead, or kidnapped, or lost in the wilderness, or—”

“Jared.” He was babbling. He always babbled when he got nervous. It made me want to babble, too, to tell him everything, to talk for hours and hours until both our voices were hoarse. But I didn’t know if we had hours, or when Jared might stop hearing me, too. “I’m fine. Really.”

“You don’t sound fine. Where are you? Have you called your dad? He gave me this number months ago, said it belonged to the guy you disappeared with. It kept going to voice mail until today—”

“We’re having—a problem with the phone. Have you spoken to Dad? Is he back home? Is he okay?”

“Of course he’s not okay, Haley.” Jared’s voice sounded like it might snap any second. “And of course he’s not home. He’s in Iceland, looking for you. Haley, where—”

“Do you have his number? No—wait.” For all I knew Jared’s call was a bit of freaky good luck that wouldn’t happen again. “I need you to call him for me. Can you do that?”

“Of course, but—”

“Call him. Please. Tell him I’m all right.” I drew a shaky breath. Whatever Dad had done, he deserved to know that much. “Tell him to tell Katrin that Ari and I are going to Hlidarendi. She’ll know why.”

“Hilda—where?”

“Hlidarendi.” I did my best to spell the name. “You’ll tell them?”

“Haley, what’s going on?”

The worry in his voice made me want to reach through the phone and hold him. But even if I could have, he probably wouldn’t have been able to see me. “Tell Dad I’m sorry I ran. Tell him—” That I forgive him. I couldn’t get the words out, because they weren’t true. “Tell him I’m on my way home, okay?”

“Are you in some sort of trouble? Should I call the police?”

“Please, Jared.”

“Okay, I’ll call your dad. Right now. Just don’t go anywhere. I’ll call you back, I promise. Keep the phone on, all right?”

I let out a breath. “Thanks, Jared.”

“God, Haley, you have no idea how good it is to hear your voice. I’ve missed you so much. Don’t go anywhere—I’ll call right back. I love you.”

“Love you, too,” I said, just like always when hanging up with Jared. Only after I closed the phone did I realize my hands were shaking.

Ari took the phone, his expression unreadable. He opened it and slowly dialed. “Hey, Mom?” he said in Icelandic. He waited a moment, then shook his head. “It’s no good.”

“Jared will call them. And then he’ll call us back, if he can.” I switched back to Icelandic, too.

Ari nodded slowly. “We should keep walking.” He shoved the phone into his pocket and got to his feet, but he didn’t reach for my hand this time. I stood as well, and we walked on in awkward silence. Around us, the hillsides were bright with autumn scrub.

The road headed uphill, then flattened out, hills giving way to barren stony flats, with gray rocks scattered about and a few dead mosses clinging to the spaces between them. The wind picked up. Ari’s phone remained silent.

“It makes no sense,” I said. “Why could Jared call?”

Ari shrugged. “Clearly, the power of your true love is stronger than Muninn’s spell.”

“Don’t joke,” I snapped. What did true love even mean? It had been so good to talk to Jared, but it was good to walk by Ari’s side, too, awkwardness and all. How could both those things be true at once?

“Who says I’m joking?” Ari said. “You have a better explanation?”

Wind blew over the stones, making a mournful sound. I thought of Mom and Dad, and I scowled. “What makes you so sure there’s any such thing as true love?”

“You’ll put songwriters out of business, talking that way. Force us to find honest work.” Ari managed a strained smile. “Seriously, Haley. Of course there’s such a thing as true love.”

I kicked a stone out of the road. “Yeah, well, tell that to my mom. Or yours, for that matter.”

Ari frowned. “I didn’t say there wasn’t a lot of other crap that gets in the way.”

“Tell it to Hallgerd’s dead husbands.” I bet Gunnar thought Hallgerd loved him, too, right up until she refused him those locks of her hair.

Ari gave a bitter laugh. “Yeah, well, there is that.”

I thought of the voices in Muninn’s mountain, of the woman whose lover ran off to Norway without her. I wondered how much true love one would find if one sifted through all the mountain’s memories—all the world’s memories.

Except Freki had said the mountain didn’t have all the world’s memories, only Iceland’s. “That’s why!” I said. “Muninn’s magic is only for Iceland. Jared’s in the States, so the spell doesn’t affect him. That has to be it! Call someone else, Ari. Call them now.”

Ari fished the phone out of his pocket and stared at it thoughtfully. “Who do you suggest I call?”

I gave him the number for Tucson’s directory assistance, because I couldn’t bear to hear a voice I knew and have that person not hear me in turn.

“You’ll run up my bill with all these overseas calls.” Ari gave a wry smile. “The country code is—one, right?” He dialed and put the phone to his ear. “Hello?” he said in English. “I would like to order a medium pepperoni and puffin pizza.” He waited, then shut the phone and spoke in Icelandic. “She said I was very funny. The operator.”

I let out a long breath. “Muninn’s wrong. We’re not forgotten by everyone.”

“No,” Ari said. “Only by everyone I know except you and some friends on the Internet.”

“Oh.” Of course. I could go back to the States, to Jared and my grandparents and my other friends at school, but what about Ari? There was no only Iceland for him—this was his home. “Maybe you could call your mom from the U.S. Maybe she’d hear you from there. We could take the coin away with us.” Would that end Hallgerd’s spell, and douse my own fire as well? Maybe all we needed to do was leave, and everything would be okay. “We could sneak onto a plane. No one would see us.”

“Not until we land.” Ari’s steps crunched over the dirt road. “How would you explain me to U.S. Customs?”

“Well, you’d have to get a passport, but—”

“I have a passport.” Ari looked down at his hands. “How would you explain if I’m not human when we land? What do you think an angry polar bear would do to an airplane, anyway?” He laughed uneasily. “Bear on a plane. It’s like a movie.”

Images of the bears in national parks, tearing the roofs off cars to get at coolers, flashed through my head. We didn’t even know what made Ari change into a bear. Was it when he got angry, like with Svan? Anger seemed to feed the fire in me as well. “Maybe the bear spell will end, too, if we leave. We should call Jared, anyway. Let him know what’s going on.” Jared should have called us back by now.

Ari handed me the phone. I dialed, but it went straight to voice mail. Maybe Jared’s battery died. Or maybe he’s still talking to Dad.

We reached another road, right at the edge of a deep blue fjord. Fog hung over the water, though the sky above was clear. We turned right again, following the fjord inland. The fog thickened.

“So your boyfriend,” Ari asked abruptly. “What’s he like?”

“He’s—” I hadn’t told Ari he was my boyfriend. Then again, you didn’t exactly say “love you” to a casual acquaintance. “He’s Jared,” I said. It’s none of your business, I thought. Yeah, right. When you kiss someone and hold his hand and then he finds out you have a boyfriend, he’s going to be just a little bit curious. People are funny that way. “Jared and I—we’ve known each other forever. Since the third grade, anyway.”

Ari raised a pale eyebrow. “You’ve had a boyfriend since the third grade?”

“No!” A flush crawled up my face. “We only started dating this year, but we’ve been best friends since we were little kids.” Jared had always been there, just like Mom and Dad. We talked about everything. I thought of his serious brown eyes when he listened to me. I thought of the way his T-shirt clung to his sweaty skin on the soccer field, and my face grew hot. I forced my thoughts back to the road and the thickening fog. The air felt damp against my neck and face, and I could only see a few feet ahead of us now. “So, you have many girlfriends?” I asked Ari. Maybe he had someone waiting in Reykjavik for him, too, someone he couldn’t call because of Muninn’s spell.

“Oh sure, hundreds of girlfriends,” Ari said. I looked at him, and he gave a wry laugh. “No, actually, I’m between girlfriends right now.”

“How long—”

“Have I been between girlfriends?” Ari paused, as if thinking about that. “Roughly—sixteen years, yeah.”

“Wait, you haven’t—” Was that his first kiss? I glanced at him, at the way his white bangs fell into his face. I thought of the worried look in his eyes when I woke up, not remembering who he was. “I find that hard to believe,” I said.

Ari seemed suddenly very interested in the road beneath his feet. “The girls I’ve asked out didn’t share your point of view.” He shrugged uncomfortably, but then a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, you can’t write good songs if you don’t get your heart broken, right?”

I managed a laugh. I’d known Jared forever, but right then I wanted nothing as much as to reach for Ari’s hand again.

Was that what had happened with Dad and Katrin? A stray thought—only Dad had followed where it led? That was different, though. Mom and Dad were married. Still, I kept my hands to myself.

Farmhouses disappeared into the mist. A row of sheep slowly crossed the road ahead of us, little more than shadows, the fog giving them a strange dignity. As we kept walking even Ari grew indistinct, a shadow seen through the gray. He took another step, disappeared—

“Ari!” I grabbed for his hand after all and felt his cool fingers grasping mine. He was still here. Of course he was still here. I could see him now, just barely, through the fog. I held my other hand in front of my face. I could barely see my own fingers. Tendrils of wet mist curled around us, soupy-thick. The road was barely visible, and I couldn’t see the water.

“Right,” Ari said. “Perhaps we should stop for a while.”

We got onto the shoulder of the road, huddling down amid damp rocks and springy mosses. Water beaded on my skin and jacket and the backpack I set down beside me. Fog swirled around us, coating the stones. The gray air felt clammy against my neck. Inside me the fire grew a little, keeping me warm. I reached a hand toward the fog. At my touch it sizzled and burned away, leaving a small clear area around us. Beneath us, the ground began to shake.

“Haley!”

I drew my hand into a fist, digging fingers into my palm, not quite breaking skin. The ground grew still. The fog settled back in, but the faint scent of sulfur lingered in the air. I forced my fingers apart.

Ari touched the back of my hand. “You’re so warm. Ever since we jumped through the fire. The creatures there—they didn’t touch me, but they touched you. Your hair—” He reached for my short hair, drew away. “What happened there?”

I drew my arms around my knees. Damp moss soaked through the seat of my jeans. “I told the fire spirits to leave you alone. They wanted some sort of payment for that, just like Muninn wanted payment for my memories. They asked for my hair, so of course I said yes, because we were both about to be burned alive.” Sweat beaded on my face at the memory of that fire. “Only the fire spirits said they were giving me some of their fire in turn. They seemed to think it was a trade.”

For several heartbeats Ari didn’t speak. The fog made the world seem very small, just the two of us in a gray cocoon. I stared at the mist clinging to Ari’s white eyelashes, wondering what it would be like to kiss him now, with all my memories intact.

“This rescuing thing—I think maybe you’re better at it than me,” Ari said at last. He pulled up a tuft of wet moss, examined it thoughtfully. “So we have two problems—sending the coin back to Hallgerd, and stopping you from setting off earthquakes everywhere you go.”

“The coin first.”

Ari nodded. “Is there anything in Mom’s notebook for this?”

“I don’t know. I kind of got stuck on the page about turning bears back into boys, you know?” I unzipped the pack and pulled out the notebook. The pages weren’t smudged and swollen like Ari’s notebook had been. Of course not—Katrin had used one of her waterproof field notebooks. The paper was a little wrinkled, nothing more, and the words were clear. She’d probably used a waterproof pen as well. She’d done all she could to make sure I wouldn’t lose the words she’d translated.

I flipped past the pages I’d already read. A spell for restoring one’s own memory. I wondered whether we could apply that to the entire island—but the spell had to be cast by the one who’d forgotten. A spell for returning berserks to their true form.

The spell for sending back the coin. I stopped and read that spell. There was a list of things it needed, like the ingredients in a recipe book. A wooden bowl. A black fire stone. (Lignite, Katrin called it in parentheses.) A raven’s claw. All the things Svan had given me, only he’d given them to me for a different spell, one I had no intention of casting. A spell that also needed—

“Shit.”

Ari looked to where I was pointing in the spellbook. The blood of a white fox, it said.

“This spell needs it, too.” I pressed my lips together. There had to be another way.

“Wait.” Ari pointed to the bottom of the page, where in smaller script a note read: If the spell’s hold is not too tight, strong drink may substitute for blood.

“How the hell are we supposed to know if the spell’s hold is too tight?”

Ari shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think it’s good you didn’t spill all that mead.”

I pulled the mead from the pack. It felt about half full. Would pouring it into a bowl count as spilling it? Freki’s warning had been against letting it touch the earth. At least we knew it was strong.

It had to work. No way was I casting the spell otherwise.

Ari frowned. “What if we call your Jared, have him call my mom and ask her what to do?” Ari pulled his phone from his pocket and opened it. His frown deepened. “Battery’s dead.”

I returned the notebook and the mead to the pack. The fog remained thick around us. My eyelids grew heavy. I closed them, saw flames behind my lids, and forced them open again. I didn’t want to dream.

Ari glanced at my hands. They were shaking. “We’ll figure it out, Haley,” he said.

There was no way he could know that, but even so, his words made me feel a little better. I rummaged through the pack and pulled out a chunk of bread. I broke it in half, handed one half to Ari, and bit fiercely into the other. Food made me feel better, too. We were both starved, even though we’d eaten only a few hours before. We quickly went through everything but the granola.

After what seemed like hours the fog finally began to thin. The sun grew low. The fog turned from gray to an eerie yellow that coated the stones around us. The sun touched the horizon.

Without warning Ari started cursing. His hands fumbled at the zipper of his jacket. “It’s the setting sun that causes it!” Ari scrambled to his feet, jacket halfway unzipped. I stood, too, reaching for him, but Ari shoved me back. “Get away.” His hands were all wrong, too large and too flat.

Ari gasped and fell to all fours. He threw back his head and roared, even as black leather flowed and melted. Leather gave way to fur, hands and feet to white paws, face to small eyes and long snout.

I didn’t run, though that roar echoed inside my chest. “Ari?” I kept my gaze on his green eyes.

The bear stared at me, trembling. I trembled, too. I’d watched enough nature documentaries to know the damage a bear’s claws could do. Yet a real polar bear would have attacked me by now.

The bear whirled from me and ran, disappearing over the stones into the fog.

“Ari!” I fumbled in my pockets for his handkerchief and realized he’d taken it back. I grabbed my pack and ran after him, shouting the words Svan had spoken:

I stopped short and waited. Ari didn’t return. Had he even heard? I made my way back to the roadside and sank to the ground. Maybe if I stayed in one place, Ari could find me. I drew my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth. Alone. Now I really was alone.

Darkness thickened around me. A bright moon rose, turning the fog silver. There wasn’t any wind. In the silence, the world seemed eerie and strange.

It wasn’t like anyone could hurt a bear, even if they could see him. Ari would be fine.

Damp fog tickled my neck. I suddenly wanted Mortimer, my stuffed wombat, more than anything. I thought of Mom, sewing and re-sewing all my stuffed animals for me. My chest felt tight.

My eyes began to close. I used my fingers to prop them open. No way did I want to dream here, alone in the dark and the fog. My heavy lids felt gritty and sore. I had to rest them, just for a moment.

It felt good to close my eyes, but that was okay—I just wouldn’t sleep.

I stood on a hillside beside a tower of gray blocks riddled with cracks. The sky was thick with clouds, the air silent and still, not a bird in sight. Quiet. Peaceful. I’d stop the dream right here. I could stop it wherever I wanted.

A burning arrow flew through the air. I knew when that arrow landed, it would burn the world—No! I reached up and caught the arrow in my hand. It burned, but I wasn’t afraid of pain.

For a heartbeat, two heartbeats, everything was okay. Then a spark caught, somewhere inside me, a spark of fire that rose to meet the fire I held. Fire roared through my blood and burst through my skin. Cracks opened beneath my feet as I screamed. The fissures stretched on and on, toward the edge of the sea.

“Free,” a rough voice whispered, and the words burned, too. “We will be free!”

I woke with a start, still screaming, drenched in sweat. The mist felt stiflingly hot. I leaped to my feet and backed away, knowing that even awake, I couldn’t escape my dreams. I heard a snuffling sound behind me, and I whirled around.

A huge white bear stared at me, bright in the moonlit fog, shaking as hard as I was. I looked at him. He looked back through bright green eyes.

“Ari?” My throat hurt from screaming.

The bear bowed his head. He lumbered toward me, then stopped, uncertain. I reached out and touched his wet nose, even as I thought about how stupid it was to just walk up and touch a bear—to touch any wild animal.

But Ari still wasn’t acting like a wild animal, and all my classes and internships and Web surfing had never covered bears who were also boys, anyway. How could they leave out a thing like that? I gave a strained laugh. It turned into a sob, and once I started sobbing I couldn’t stop.

Ari nudged my chest with his muzzle. I threw my arms around his thick neck, still sobbing. His fur was cold and damp. I clung to it, feeling the burning memory of my dream subside. “How the hell did either of us get into this mess?” I demanded. Ari had no answer to that. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back,” I said, and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.

I curled up on the ground then, and Ari stretched out beside me, watching me still. The fog was clearing at last, and up above the moon shone so brightly it hurt my eyes. I closed them and buried my face in Ari’s cool white fur, which felt coarse and soft and slippery all at once. I started drifting off, too tired to stop myself, even though maybe Svan’s spell to turn Ari human would have worked now.

“You’re not Mortimer,” I whispered to Ari, “but you’ll do.”

I slept once more, and for the first time since having arrived in Iceland—the first time since my mother had disappeared—I had no dreams.