Part 3: Chapter 1: Another perspective on affairs
Apparently there are people out there who worship Loki. This page clears up some "misconceptions"! I'm sure my Loki would approve, though some might call it revisionist history.
An image search reveals he also has lots of dogs and cats named after him.
Part 3
Chapter 1: Test
New things were finally happening in Anthony Blanding’s life. He wasn’t sure what they were or why, only that they involved that poor scarecrow of a farm girl, Aslaug Andersson.
On the same day he discovered a small pile of ashes beside Aslaug’s desk (had she been smoking cigars? burning things for a Wiccan ritual?), Mr. Blanding developed a dreamy, almost spring-like mood. He left school early and took the most extraordinary walk up the mountain. The sun came out and turned the grass velvety green and purple and the bare gray rocks crimson. He took the hiking trail through the Defile and walked for several miles, almost all the way to Skorriesville. His work shoes were ruined when he got back, but he didn’t care. He felt the strangest energy, very similar to what he used to experience in his undergrad years after drinking too many espressos at Café Roma, when he strolled across campus and gazed at the running brook and the fanciful old buildings and the brown hills in the distance and the lush California foliage. He felt alive.
He felt like getting up to something. He felt like doing some mischief.
But mischief was foreign to Mr. Blanding’s nature, so he had no idea how. Could you do mischief safely, he wondered, without endangering your job and your mortgage and your green card and your weekly supply of grocery money? He had a feeling you could not.
All the same, he phoned Fiona Cray and asked her out to dinner in the city, in the most charming and rakish tone he could muster. She hedged a bit and acted suspicious, but she said yes.
The next day after classes, as Mr. Blanding was putting his papers together to leave, the younger Cray girl and the big Wildasin boy and Aslaug Andersson burst into the room. To see them acting like fast friends was nothing he would have expected. But he supposed outcasts couldn’t be blamed for finding comfort in each other’s company.
They could, however, be blamed for how they treated him.
The boy, whom Mr. Blanding already knew to be smart-mouthed, was even worse now. He walked straight up and looked Mr. Blanding in the eye and said, “Who are you, really? Who’s in there?”
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Blanding, looking to the Cray girl for help against this obviously disturbed child. She might be a bit difficult herself, but he was fairly sure she was sane.
Sure enough: “Stephen,” said Imogen warningly.
This did not prevent the boy from launching into a series of questions Mr. Blanding did not understand in the least, though he certainly understood their offensive, accusing tone. The boy pointed at the spiky blue tattoo on the back of his hand and said, “Tell me you don’t understand what this means, you slimy, rune-casting half-breed. Just tell me.”
Mr. Blanding didn’t like dealing with deranged people. He felt a bit dizzy and had to sit down and wipe his glasses. While wiping his glasses, he found to his surprise that he didn’t need them. His vision was perfect. Why had he been wearing them all this time?
He folded his glasses and slipped them in his shirt pocket and turned to face the three children. He caught the Andersson girl’s blue eyes for a split second before she dropped them as usual. For some reason this made her gasp. It made him feel a little faint, as well, because her eyes were much bluer than he expected. He tried to find a word for them, for the odd way they had made his heart pound and his head spin, and came up with intoxicating.
But also deranged, like the boy. Definitely deranged. He had no desire to look into them any longer.
“I don’t think you know anymore what happened,” said the poor girl in a low, surprisingly melodious voice. “He’s made it so you can somehow still be, but you’ve forgotten everything.”
“Maybe you got confused, Aslaug,” said the Cray girl.
“No,” said the Andersson girl, more firmly than Mr. Blanding had ever heard her say anything.
“I’m sorry,” said Imogen Cray to Mr. Blanding. And to the others, “Look. We’re upsetting him. We should go.”
“No,” said the boy. “I believe what Aslaug says. This is a shape-shifter, remember? He could disguise himself as you or me.”
“Then how do we know you’re not him?”
“You don’t.”
Aslaug interrupted them. “Mr. Blanding, we’re sorry. We made a mistake. Stephen. We should go.”
The boy glowered at Mr. Blanding. But when the girl with the long, tangled golden hair placed her hand on his arm, he grimaced and dropped his eyes. “OK.”
The boy’s face was transparent, full of pride and anger and annoyance and something else. He’s got it bad for her, Mr. Blanding thought, summoning up cloudy memories of his own teenage years. And he’s probably stupid enough never to say a word because he’s scared she won’t feel the same way.
As they left the room, he found himself laughing for no reason he could name - maybe just because the mismatched trio of them seemed so comical. The Cray girl liked the boy; he was pretty sure of it. She walked too close to him, looked at him too protectively. And the boy liked Aslaug, who liked - who did she like? He was pretty sure he knew, but didn’t want to dwell on it.
When he laughed, all three gave a start and turned to look at him, and the odious boy said, “It is you. You’re hiding. If I knew the runes, I could make you come out.”
“Stephen! All he did was laugh,” said Imogen Cray. With a worried glance at Mr. Blanding, she steered her hothead friend out the door.
A few days later, while dressing for his date with Fiona Cray, Mr. Blanding practiced his laugh.
It did sound odd, even to him - a little manic, a little unhinged. But perhaps this was what happened when you started seeing the purple in the grass and the scarlet on the mountains. Maybe this was how you laughed when the funk lifted from you, even briefly. Perhaps, like a young goat in spring, you ran a little wild.
He did not wear his glasses to the restaurant; he had stopped wearing them altogether. Fiona peered at him when they met in front of the university library, as if he had changed and she was trying to deduce just how. He pulled out a small bouquet of amethyst-colored asters and said, “Sorry if they’re too plain. I hate roses, the florist’s kind anyway. The wild ones smell so much… wilder.”
“They do!” said Fiona. She plunged her nose into the asters. “These smell like they came from the fields above my house.”
“Maybe they did!” said Mr. Blanding. Did he sound sly, perhaps even a touch devilish? He thought so.
This date developed into a far more pleasant encounter than the last one, though perhaps the restaurant’s expensive bottle of Merlot had something to do with it. Mr. Blanding didn’t worry about the expense. He looked into Fiona’s eyes and thought how odd and amusing it was that such a pretty, lively girl was so obsessed with dead languages and dead people’s outdated beliefs. He asked her to explain everything about her studies in detail, and posed questions that made her blush and explain some more. He said he regretted not having kept up with his own academic research (which was a complete lie, or at least had been till this moment). During dessert, he reached across the table twice to touch her hand, and she did not pull away. At ten, after the restaurant stopped serving, he walked her to her car and complimented her funny hand-knitted striped scarf and reached across to finger it and then touched the side of her face and kissed her.
Fiona kissed him back. “I like you without your glasses,” she said. “I thought you didn’t like me.”
How could she possibly have thought that? She was a silly young modern-day American girl, yes, with a silly scarf and no concept of what truly mattered in life, but this didn’t make him like her any less. On the contrary. He realized now that youth and silliness were and always had been very attractive to him. Every year new sweet, silly people were born. They made the world go round. He felt very old.
After the kiss, she invited him over to her house for dinner. “If I can keep my family away for a little while, it might even be nice,” she said.
Dinner at the Crays! That was an occasion. Mr. Blanding considered dressing up, then thought better of it. The prospect put him in a good mood for a whole week. He even laughed and rolled his eyes when his Euro History classroom filled with juniors wearing black T-shirts that bore a stylized white graphic that looked at first like a lizard, or maybe a tree stump. But when you looked close enough, you realized it was actually a giant hand rudely giving you the finger. Flip It for Kristen, the back of the shirts said. Because you don’t have to.
Mr. Blanding asked around the teachers’ lounge and found out the shirts were part of Kristen Hawke’s campaign for class president. A girl who wore black and hung out in the art studio had designed them, and they were causing all sorts of uproar among parents and the staff. On the day the principal banned the rude shirts, three students came in wearing a new design. This one showed the same giant white hand, but now its once-protruding middle finger had been severed, leaving what looked like a bloody stump. That set off a fresh round of complaints. When the second shirt design was banned, two of Mr. Blanding’s male juniors came to class wearing no shirts at all.
They must be cold, thought Mr. Blanding, but he ignored the whispering and titters, though he supposed some teachers would toss the protesting students out. He was pleased to note that Kristen Hawke also seemed unmoved by the attention she was receiving. When he asked her to define “civil disobedience,” she said, “I don’t know.”
“Look around you,” said Mr. Blanding. “See civil disobedience in action. Observe our latest little demonstration of solidarity with your campaign against this campus’s Powers That Be.”
But Kristen merely looked confused. “I don’t mind powers,” she said. “I just think nobody should have to- ”
One of the shirtless boys finished for her, in a chanting voice. “- do anything they don’t want to do.”
“Or even anything they do,” said the other boy.
“Well,” said Mr. Blanding. “It looks as if, Ms. Hawke, you have a very vigorous volunteer get-out-the-vote effort.”
But still, he found the way the two boys echoed each other unsettling - especially because the second one was Billy Corcoran, who was usually more apt to take the lead.
He forgot about it that evening when he walked up the cracked slate path to the Cray house and rang the bell. Fiona answered, wearing a red-and-black flowered dress and an orange cardigan. Mr. Blanding gave her more flowers - exotic Thai orchids, this time - and a bottle of wine. “I would give you a house tour,” she said. “But this house is stuffed with other female Crays. It’s all I could do to keep them upstairs for the evening.”
Mr. Blanding swore that it would be an honor to meet her aunt and grandmother, and eventually a flustered Fiona did bring him upstairs for introductions. He discovered that he had already met the fetching young (if somewhat strapping) aunt, which was embarrassing, because he didn’t remember her.
Back downstairs, he sat in the candle-lit formal dining-room, admiring the old house’s crown molding and carved sideboard while Fiona put the finishing touches on dinner. They had a leisurely meal, during which he told Fiona funny stories about his relatives back in Australia. It seemed as if he’d only just remembered how bizarre his relatives and their small-town friends were. Fiona laughed appreciatively and asked questions and kept bringing him food and wine. Her cooking was not stellar, but it did not keep him from enjoying the evening.
When the old clock struck midnight - inaccurately, she assured him - Fiona rummaged inside the sideboard and found a bottle of excellent port. After pouring for them both, she rose from the table with her glass in hand and stood before the sideboard mirror, staring at her reflection lit by the tall candles on either side. “Snuff out the candles on the table,” she said.
He laughed. “Why?”
“When I was little,” said Fiona, “my Polish nanny told me that when you look into a mirror by candle-light, you can see if there’s a ghost standing behind you. But there can’t be any other light in the room.”
Mr. Blanding laughed again and reached out and pinched a candle-flame into nothingness between his thumb and index finger. “What,” he asked, “do you often see ghosts wandering around your house?”
“Occasionally,” said Fiona in a stern voice.
So Mr. Blanding put out the other candles on the table, then came and stood beside Fiona at the sideboard where she was still gazing at herself. He figured this might be a good excuse to kiss her. “You are indeed the fairest, sweetheart,” he said, and buried his face in her hair.
“Not now,” said Fiona, whose body felt surprisingly tense. She stepped away from the mirror. “Now you try it.”
“But I was just there.”
“Try it without me.”
You had to see yourself alone in the mirror, he supposed. So he gazed at himself, framed between two fuzzy auras of candle-light. White shirt, stylish tie, long white face, increasingly wild hair (had he forgotten to comb it?), no glasses. His eyes were faint glitters, no more. Everything behind him was shadows, no ghosts in sight.
He turned to look at Fiona and saw nothing at all. He was standing in blackness, with no top or bottom. His head spun.
When he looked back at the sideboard mirror, he understood why. Affixed to the lower left corner of the glass, where he could hardly believe he hadn’t noticed it earlier, was a glowing rune.
Not a real rune. A big, over-complicated doodle of a rune, the kind they used in Iceland only a few centuries ago to perform sloppy, rudimentary witchcraft at a time when intelligent people no longer believed in witches. Superstition. The kind of rune you might find if you looked up “rune” on the Internet.
Though it was not a true rune and had no power over him, Mr. Blanding recognized it all the same. This sort of rune was intended to make other enchantments reveal themselves. If it had worked, he realized, he would not have appeared in the mirror at all. Being not a reality but a trick of light, an enchantment, an illusion, his body would have vanished from the mirror image. Fiona would have frozen in horror, thinking she had invited a vampire to dinner. When he was actually only…
What was he?
A new man. A man with new blood in his veins.
And then, for just an instant, Mr. Blanding remembered the heat and sensation of suffocation, the breath being pressed out of his lungs. The blinding light. Struggling and losing the battle and falling, and feeling relief because now it was all over, finally, and he would never have to struggle to try to understand things again. He remembered fire. He remembered burning. He remembered dying.
The Andersson girl had killed him. Burnt his body to ash.
A new man. Who was he now?
Again he turned. The blackness had resolved itself into warm shadows, and Fiona appeared behind him. When he looked into the mirror again, the rune no longer glowed. It was just a design that looked as if someone might have traced it with a fine-pointed Sharpie.
“Someone’s been doing graffiti on your antique mirror,” he murmured, and reached for Fiona to kiss her.
An image search reveals he also has lots of dogs and cats named after him.
Part 3
Chapter 1: Test
New things were finally happening in Anthony Blanding’s life. He wasn’t sure what they were or why, only that they involved that poor scarecrow of a farm girl, Aslaug Andersson.
On the same day he discovered a small pile of ashes beside Aslaug’s desk (had she been smoking cigars? burning things for a Wiccan ritual?), Mr. Blanding developed a dreamy, almost spring-like mood. He left school early and took the most extraordinary walk up the mountain. The sun came out and turned the grass velvety green and purple and the bare gray rocks crimson. He took the hiking trail through the Defile and walked for several miles, almost all the way to Skorriesville. His work shoes were ruined when he got back, but he didn’t care. He felt the strangest energy, very similar to what he used to experience in his undergrad years after drinking too many espressos at Café Roma, when he strolled across campus and gazed at the running brook and the fanciful old buildings and the brown hills in the distance and the lush California foliage. He felt alive.
He felt like getting up to something. He felt like doing some mischief.
But mischief was foreign to Mr. Blanding’s nature, so he had no idea how. Could you do mischief safely, he wondered, without endangering your job and your mortgage and your green card and your weekly supply of grocery money? He had a feeling you could not.
All the same, he phoned Fiona Cray and asked her out to dinner in the city, in the most charming and rakish tone he could muster. She hedged a bit and acted suspicious, but she said yes.
The next day after classes, as Mr. Blanding was putting his papers together to leave, the younger Cray girl and the big Wildasin boy and Aslaug Andersson burst into the room. To see them acting like fast friends was nothing he would have expected. But he supposed outcasts couldn’t be blamed for finding comfort in each other’s company.
They could, however, be blamed for how they treated him.
The boy, whom Mr. Blanding already knew to be smart-mouthed, was even worse now. He walked straight up and looked Mr. Blanding in the eye and said, “Who are you, really? Who’s in there?”
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Blanding, looking to the Cray girl for help against this obviously disturbed child. She might be a bit difficult herself, but he was fairly sure she was sane.
Sure enough: “Stephen,” said Imogen warningly.
This did not prevent the boy from launching into a series of questions Mr. Blanding did not understand in the least, though he certainly understood their offensive, accusing tone. The boy pointed at the spiky blue tattoo on the back of his hand and said, “Tell me you don’t understand what this means, you slimy, rune-casting half-breed. Just tell me.”
Mr. Blanding didn’t like dealing with deranged people. He felt a bit dizzy and had to sit down and wipe his glasses. While wiping his glasses, he found to his surprise that he didn’t need them. His vision was perfect. Why had he been wearing them all this time?
He folded his glasses and slipped them in his shirt pocket and turned to face the three children. He caught the Andersson girl’s blue eyes for a split second before she dropped them as usual. For some reason this made her gasp. It made him feel a little faint, as well, because her eyes were much bluer than he expected. He tried to find a word for them, for the odd way they had made his heart pound and his head spin, and came up with intoxicating.
But also deranged, like the boy. Definitely deranged. He had no desire to look into them any longer.
“I don’t think you know anymore what happened,” said the poor girl in a low, surprisingly melodious voice. “He’s made it so you can somehow still be, but you’ve forgotten everything.”
“Maybe you got confused, Aslaug,” said the Cray girl.
“No,” said the Andersson girl, more firmly than Mr. Blanding had ever heard her say anything.
“I’m sorry,” said Imogen Cray to Mr. Blanding. And to the others, “Look. We’re upsetting him. We should go.”
“No,” said the boy. “I believe what Aslaug says. This is a shape-shifter, remember? He could disguise himself as you or me.”
“Then how do we know you’re not him?”
“You don’t.”
Aslaug interrupted them. “Mr. Blanding, we’re sorry. We made a mistake. Stephen. We should go.”
The boy glowered at Mr. Blanding. But when the girl with the long, tangled golden hair placed her hand on his arm, he grimaced and dropped his eyes. “OK.”
The boy’s face was transparent, full of pride and anger and annoyance and something else. He’s got it bad for her, Mr. Blanding thought, summoning up cloudy memories of his own teenage years. And he’s probably stupid enough never to say a word because he’s scared she won’t feel the same way.
As they left the room, he found himself laughing for no reason he could name - maybe just because the mismatched trio of them seemed so comical. The Cray girl liked the boy; he was pretty sure of it. She walked too close to him, looked at him too protectively. And the boy liked Aslaug, who liked - who did she like? He was pretty sure he knew, but didn’t want to dwell on it.
When he laughed, all three gave a start and turned to look at him, and the odious boy said, “It is you. You’re hiding. If I knew the runes, I could make you come out.”
“Stephen! All he did was laugh,” said Imogen Cray. With a worried glance at Mr. Blanding, she steered her hothead friend out the door.
A few days later, while dressing for his date with Fiona Cray, Mr. Blanding practiced his laugh.
It did sound odd, even to him - a little manic, a little unhinged. But perhaps this was what happened when you started seeing the purple in the grass and the scarlet on the mountains. Maybe this was how you laughed when the funk lifted from you, even briefly. Perhaps, like a young goat in spring, you ran a little wild.
He did not wear his glasses to the restaurant; he had stopped wearing them altogether. Fiona peered at him when they met in front of the university library, as if he had changed and she was trying to deduce just how. He pulled out a small bouquet of amethyst-colored asters and said, “Sorry if they’re too plain. I hate roses, the florist’s kind anyway. The wild ones smell so much… wilder.”
“They do!” said Fiona. She plunged her nose into the asters. “These smell like they came from the fields above my house.”
“Maybe they did!” said Mr. Blanding. Did he sound sly, perhaps even a touch devilish? He thought so.
This date developed into a far more pleasant encounter than the last one, though perhaps the restaurant’s expensive bottle of Merlot had something to do with it. Mr. Blanding didn’t worry about the expense. He looked into Fiona’s eyes and thought how odd and amusing it was that such a pretty, lively girl was so obsessed with dead languages and dead people’s outdated beliefs. He asked her to explain everything about her studies in detail, and posed questions that made her blush and explain some more. He said he regretted not having kept up with his own academic research (which was a complete lie, or at least had been till this moment). During dessert, he reached across the table twice to touch her hand, and she did not pull away. At ten, after the restaurant stopped serving, he walked her to her car and complimented her funny hand-knitted striped scarf and reached across to finger it and then touched the side of her face and kissed her.
Fiona kissed him back. “I like you without your glasses,” she said. “I thought you didn’t like me.”
How could she possibly have thought that? She was a silly young modern-day American girl, yes, with a silly scarf and no concept of what truly mattered in life, but this didn’t make him like her any less. On the contrary. He realized now that youth and silliness were and always had been very attractive to him. Every year new sweet, silly people were born. They made the world go round. He felt very old.
After the kiss, she invited him over to her house for dinner. “If I can keep my family away for a little while, it might even be nice,” she said.
Dinner at the Crays! That was an occasion. Mr. Blanding considered dressing up, then thought better of it. The prospect put him in a good mood for a whole week. He even laughed and rolled his eyes when his Euro History classroom filled with juniors wearing black T-shirts that bore a stylized white graphic that looked at first like a lizard, or maybe a tree stump. But when you looked close enough, you realized it was actually a giant hand rudely giving you the finger. Flip It for Kristen, the back of the shirts said. Because you don’t have to.
Mr. Blanding asked around the teachers’ lounge and found out the shirts were part of Kristen Hawke’s campaign for class president. A girl who wore black and hung out in the art studio had designed them, and they were causing all sorts of uproar among parents and the staff. On the day the principal banned the rude shirts, three students came in wearing a new design. This one showed the same giant white hand, but now its once-protruding middle finger had been severed, leaving what looked like a bloody stump. That set off a fresh round of complaints. When the second shirt design was banned, two of Mr. Blanding’s male juniors came to class wearing no shirts at all.
They must be cold, thought Mr. Blanding, but he ignored the whispering and titters, though he supposed some teachers would toss the protesting students out. He was pleased to note that Kristen Hawke also seemed unmoved by the attention she was receiving. When he asked her to define “civil disobedience,” she said, “I don’t know.”
“Look around you,” said Mr. Blanding. “See civil disobedience in action. Observe our latest little demonstration of solidarity with your campaign against this campus’s Powers That Be.”
But Kristen merely looked confused. “I don’t mind powers,” she said. “I just think nobody should have to- ”
One of the shirtless boys finished for her, in a chanting voice. “- do anything they don’t want to do.”
“Or even anything they do,” said the other boy.
“Well,” said Mr. Blanding. “It looks as if, Ms. Hawke, you have a very vigorous volunteer get-out-the-vote effort.”
But still, he found the way the two boys echoed each other unsettling - especially because the second one was Billy Corcoran, who was usually more apt to take the lead.
He forgot about it that evening when he walked up the cracked slate path to the Cray house and rang the bell. Fiona answered, wearing a red-and-black flowered dress and an orange cardigan. Mr. Blanding gave her more flowers - exotic Thai orchids, this time - and a bottle of wine. “I would give you a house tour,” she said. “But this house is stuffed with other female Crays. It’s all I could do to keep them upstairs for the evening.”
Mr. Blanding swore that it would be an honor to meet her aunt and grandmother, and eventually a flustered Fiona did bring him upstairs for introductions. He discovered that he had already met the fetching young (if somewhat strapping) aunt, which was embarrassing, because he didn’t remember her.
Back downstairs, he sat in the candle-lit formal dining-room, admiring the old house’s crown molding and carved sideboard while Fiona put the finishing touches on dinner. They had a leisurely meal, during which he told Fiona funny stories about his relatives back in Australia. It seemed as if he’d only just remembered how bizarre his relatives and their small-town friends were. Fiona laughed appreciatively and asked questions and kept bringing him food and wine. Her cooking was not stellar, but it did not keep him from enjoying the evening.
When the old clock struck midnight - inaccurately, she assured him - Fiona rummaged inside the sideboard and found a bottle of excellent port. After pouring for them both, she rose from the table with her glass in hand and stood before the sideboard mirror, staring at her reflection lit by the tall candles on either side. “Snuff out the candles on the table,” she said.
He laughed. “Why?”
“When I was little,” said Fiona, “my Polish nanny told me that when you look into a mirror by candle-light, you can see if there’s a ghost standing behind you. But there can’t be any other light in the room.”
Mr. Blanding laughed again and reached out and pinched a candle-flame into nothingness between his thumb and index finger. “What,” he asked, “do you often see ghosts wandering around your house?”
“Occasionally,” said Fiona in a stern voice.
So Mr. Blanding put out the other candles on the table, then came and stood beside Fiona at the sideboard where she was still gazing at herself. He figured this might be a good excuse to kiss her. “You are indeed the fairest, sweetheart,” he said, and buried his face in her hair.
“Not now,” said Fiona, whose body felt surprisingly tense. She stepped away from the mirror. “Now you try it.”
“But I was just there.”
“Try it without me.”
You had to see yourself alone in the mirror, he supposed. So he gazed at himself, framed between two fuzzy auras of candle-light. White shirt, stylish tie, long white face, increasingly wild hair (had he forgotten to comb it?), no glasses. His eyes were faint glitters, no more. Everything behind him was shadows, no ghosts in sight.
He turned to look at Fiona and saw nothing at all. He was standing in blackness, with no top or bottom. His head spun.
When he looked back at the sideboard mirror, he understood why. Affixed to the lower left corner of the glass, where he could hardly believe he hadn’t noticed it earlier, was a glowing rune.
Not a real rune. A big, over-complicated doodle of a rune, the kind they used in Iceland only a few centuries ago to perform sloppy, rudimentary witchcraft at a time when intelligent people no longer believed in witches. Superstition. The kind of rune you might find if you looked up “rune” on the Internet.
Though it was not a true rune and had no power over him, Mr. Blanding recognized it all the same. This sort of rune was intended to make other enchantments reveal themselves. If it had worked, he realized, he would not have appeared in the mirror at all. Being not a reality but a trick of light, an enchantment, an illusion, his body would have vanished from the mirror image. Fiona would have frozen in horror, thinking she had invited a vampire to dinner. When he was actually only…
What was he?
A new man. A man with new blood in his veins.
And then, for just an instant, Mr. Blanding remembered the heat and sensation of suffocation, the breath being pressed out of his lungs. The blinding light. Struggling and losing the battle and falling, and feeling relief because now it was all over, finally, and he would never have to struggle to try to understand things again. He remembered fire. He remembered burning. He remembered dying.
The Andersson girl had killed him. Burnt his body to ash.
A new man. Who was he now?
Again he turned. The blackness had resolved itself into warm shadows, and Fiona appeared behind him. When he looked into the mirror again, the rune no longer glowed. It was just a design that looked as if someone might have traced it with a fine-pointed Sharpie.
“Someone’s been doing graffiti on your antique mirror,” he murmured, and reached for Fiona to kiss her.