“What’s the big picture, then?” Molly asked. “Why do they have to die? Other than being vampires, right? It sounds personal.”
He nodded, and stared at their names. “They left me to die. They sailed without me. Left me with the… with the Danes, for a whole winter. We were on a raid, and it went bad and we had to flee. They got to the boats before I did and left me. I could’ve died. I should have died. I made it through the winter and found… I found my wife carried another man’s child.
“He cast her out. I took her in, but there was… shame for her. Men scorned me as weak for taking her back. We left for another village, and… and she was murdered there. I avenged her… yet none of that would have happened to her but for Unferth and Bjorn.”
“Alex,” said Onyx, placing a hand on his cheek. “You don’t seem to me like the type to get hung up on revenge.”
“What are you-of course, I want revenge, I-what did you call me?”
“Alex,” she repeated. “You’re Alex.”
He stared at her, then closed his eyes and let out a shuddering breath. “I feel a little freaked out by this.”
“Yeah, I would be, too,” Molly agreed. “It’s okay. You need to feel everything.”
“What’s happening?”
“You need to grieve,” Onyx told him. “You need to mourn, and face all this baggage from all these lives, and then you need to let it go.”
“Will I forget everything?”
“A lot of it,” she nodded. “This is all a part of you. It’s who you are, deep down. But you won’t feel it so much, and that’s what hurts you and confuses you. It’s not the memories, right? It’s the emotions.”
“Don’t the memories cause the emotions?”
“They won’t once you’re ready to let them go.”
“Why can’t I just forget it all?”
“Because you need it, Alex. Because this,” she said, pointing to the runes, “all this is you. Skorri is you, but you’re not living that life anymore.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier?”
“We talked about this when we came up with this plan,” continued Onyx, taking his hand. “You’re a great guy with a big heart and we like you that way. We like you a lot. But your life is crazy, Alex. You grew up in a stable home and a nice, safe city, and now you live in a world with monsters.
“Part of you shot and stabbed your way out of a house full of monsters once, Alex,” she said, looking him in the eye. “You need that part. It saved your life twice now. Grieving isn’t about forgetting. It’s about releasing emotions and moving on.”
Molly took his other hand. “Hold still,” she instructed as she produced a marker. She wrote on his hand, painstakingly copying the runes that spelled out his name in Old Norse.
“The circle isn’t done yet,” she said, “but I think we can help you with the rest.”
He knew this would be weird. He trusted the women who brought him here and who told him what he needed to do. He desperately wanted his nightmares and all of his nameless heartache laid to rest. But it was still weird.
Alex lay in the center of the ritual circle, still inhaling the rosemary smoke. He felt cold, given the bare concrete underneath him and the lack of a shirt or shoes. His companions sat inside the circle with him, one at his feet and one at his head, both chanting something he could almost recognize. He couldn’t see either of them, or anything else. His eyes were covered by two of the silver coins they’d bought that morning. He held the third in his mouth.
He needed the coins, they said, to pay off the boatman-with interest.
The words they chanted seemed so familiar. Alex had scraped through two years of Spanish in high school. That was the extent of his foreign language skills. Yet listening to the witches, he could swear he knew half of those words. They used words like “love” and “death” and “memory” and “obols,” which he knew to mean “coin” but had never heard or used in his life.
These weren’t proper obols. They weren’t even close. He knew that, too, and had a clear idea of what an obol should look like. These were silver coins, and maybe that was close enough for sorcery, but they weren’t actually obols.
He remembered all sorts of strange things, too. He remembered lying on less comfortable surfaces than this, like the rocky ground on the road to the Holy Land and the slave pen in Rome. He remembered toiling in fields and shivering through cold nights outside Danish villages, waiting for people to go to bed so he might slip in and steal some food.
Molly and Onyx shifted from his head and feet to each take up a spot kneeling at his sides. They took his hands.
He remembered lying on a field in the spring, staring up at the sky with his belly in a terrible twist of pain and wetness. He remembered a woman who knelt beside him and held his hand as he died. Even with the coins over his eyes, it was as if he could see her clearly.
Except instead of the old Gypsy woman, he saw Onyx. Molly was there, too, kneeling at his other side… but now in his mind he couldn’t tell Onyx and the Gypsy woman apart.
They kept chanting. They each took up one of his hands, holding them palms-up to the sky in supplication. At first, his hands bore the same uneven discoloration and faint burn scars that they had for a month. Then he saw the blood and blisters from building Halla’s funeral pyre on a cold morning all by himself, and feared he might never be able to play the piano again.
No. Not the piano. Not anything. He hadn’t played a musical instrument since that time he and Wade got busted for sword-fighting with their recorders in music class in the fifth grade.
Conflicting images and sensations from his body and his mind left him feeling much like this was a vivid dream from which he might awaken any moment. He lay on his back but stood; had his eyes closed, but saw his surroundings. Molly and Onyx gripped his hands and lifted him up in the dream world, which now bore no resemblance to the springtime meadow of before, and… “Onyx,” said Molly.
“What?”
“Your clothes.”
Alex looked. She wore the clothes of the old Gypsy woman. Molly appeared as she always did. None of Alex’s clothes changed, either.
The two witches exchanged a long, thoughtful look. Whatever their thoughts, they did not share them with Alex. Instead, they turned to the task at hand.
They stood on a rocky riverbank. Fog stretched all around them, thin enough to reveal the waters beyond but little more than that. Alex thought to look up. He felt as if he might be underground somewhere. That led him to wonder where the light came from. With the coin in his mouth, he couldn’t ask.
The witches led him by the hand. “This is Acheron,” explained Molly as Onyx resumed the chant. “We need to find the boatman.”
Alex turned his face to her, wanting to ask something. He couldn’t speak. Molly shrugged. “We’ve never been here before, either.”
They walked. The witches took care not to step near the water. Alex looked to it as they moved and felt his sorrow rise. He felt loneliness. He felt betrayal. He could remember the names.
For a time, all he heard was the chant held by Onyx and the sound of their footsteps on the cold rocks. Then he heard the soft sound of something pushing through the water. Soon, they saw the source of the sound.
The build and curves of the boat stirred old memories for Alex, but the boatman seemed familiar only as a figure out of stories told by old men. He seemed like a poor man, long unshaven and dressed in red and brown rags. Everything about him spoke of power and vitality despite great age. He pushed his boat to the shore with his ferryman’s pole and waited.
Alex watched from his spot on the shore. He felt the coins removed from his eyes as he lay on the floor in the apartment. Onyx took the coin from his mouth, both in the apartment and on the shore. She placed them in his hand, and then the two witches took hold of his wrists and guided him up to kneel on the concrete. His eyes stayed shut there so that he might continue to see the river and the boatman.