He gave me the names of a couple of towns where he thought they might live, and escorted us to the door. The Vikings were still riding high on their adrenaline rush caused by destroying the demon’s form, and were quite happy to walk the quarter mile into the town proper, reliving the (in their minds glorious) fight blow by blow.
Chapter 15
Ben was nowhere to be found when we made it back to the Faire. I considered calling him on my mental cell phone (it seemed so much easier than using a real one), but decided I wasn’t such a wimp that I needed to keep tabs on him every second of the day. He was a big boy—I could trust him to go off and do things on his own without knowing exactly what it was he was doing.
The fact that Naomi was at her tattooing booth might have had something to do with my determination to give Ben his space, but I preferred to think of it as being comfortable with our blossoming relationship.
“Let’s go find a quiet spot,” I told the Vikings.
“You are going to summon Loki?” Isleif asked, hope in his eyes.
“Yes.”
They cheered, and accompanied me to a corner of the field that held a couple of huge round cylinders made of up hay. I moved behind them, so they blocked the sight of anyone who might be arriving at the Faire, and pulled out the Vikingahärta. “I just hope I remember how to use this.”
“You will,” Eirik said, taking up a protective stance on my left. Finnvid did the same on my right, both swords in his hands, while behind me Isleif hefted his huge war ax. I didn’t point out to them that Loki wasn’t going to be as easy to destroy as the demon had been.
I held the Vikingahärta, closing my eyes for a few seconds to help calm my troubled thoughts, focusing on one image, as my mother had taught me to do whenever I was about to conduct an invocation.
That image was of her.
“By the fire that burns within thee.” My words came out halting and stiff, reflecting how uncomfortable I was with this. I held the image of my mother in the forefront of my mind and tried again to calm my nerves. “By the earth that feeds thee. By the air that hides thee, by the Vikingahärta that holds thee.”
The valknut grew warm in my unharmed hand, little pinpricks of light beginning to beam out from it. I slipped off the makeshift sling, not wanting Loki to see that I was anything but in the most tip-top shape.
“Deceiver.”
The air around us crackled.
“Slayer.”
Before us, motes of light started gathering together.
“Trickster.”
The lights swirled faster and faster around each other, spinning and elongating into a long oval shape.
“Betrayer.”
The shape shimmered, and darkened in the center as a human form began to resolve itself.
“I invoke thee and call upon thee to descend here!”
The man who stepped out of the light was not who I expected. We stared at each other for a few seconds—me utterly surprised, and he looking furious.
“Who are you?” he demanded, glaring first at me, then at the Vikings, who were just as taken aback as I was.
“I’m Fran. Er . . . you’re not Loki, are you?”
He didn’t look like Loki, whose appearance I remembered as an older man, rather thin, with very white hands and balding red hair. This man had dark brown hair, a goatee, and dark eyes that glittered with anger. I took an instinctive step back, raising my hand with the valknut in a protective gesture that attracted his attention.
“What do you have there? ” He ignored my questions, casting his own out with a sharp bark that had a compulsion attached to it—a sort of magic spell that made you want to do whatever was asked of you.
“It’s mine,” I said, struggling against the need to answer him.
“Vikingahärta,” Finnvid blurted out.
I glared at him.
“Sorry, goddess,” he murmured, looking somewhat chagrined.
“Goddess?” The man’s eyes narrowed on me. “Vikingahärta?”
I straightened myself up, holding the Vikingahärta firmly, drawing strength from the fact that it didn’t like this man. “No to the first, yes to the second. Would you mind telling me who you are, and why, when I summoned Loki, you appeared instead?”
“Do not summon me again,” he snapped, and while I stared at him in surprise, he spun around and walked back into the oval of light, which proceeded to dissolve until it was nothing.
“Bullfrogs! With warts on them!” I swore, wanting to do bodily harm to someone. “What was all that about? Who was that man? And why did he come when I called Loki?”
“Should we know the answer to that?” Isleif asked Eirik.
Eirik shrugged. “The goddess knows things. She tells us, not the other way around.”