Chapter 1: A Hunch, A Spell, and A Tip
DESPERATION MAKES A TERRIBLE WITCH.
Hot. Sticky. Broke.
New Orleans in July, and I'm all three.
The clock above my kitchen sink ticks like it's being paid by the hour. Each tick lands a little harder than the last, a tiny hammer against whatever hope I had left for tonight.
Forty-three dollars.
I count it twice on the Formica, smoothing every bill flat with the side of my hand like that might make them multiply. Two twenties. Three ones. A cocktail napkin with a phone number from a man who tipped in compliments and left a pale ring on his finger where his wedding band lives on weekdays.
Six hours at The Rusty Spoon. Six hours of sticky daiquiri glasses, bachelorette sashes, and a guy from Ohio who asked if the Bywater was "the safe part." The Spoon serves potent daiquiris and even more potent gossip, and tonight it paid out less in tips than a politician's promise.
Rent is due Friday.
Rent is eleven hundred dollars.
Behind me, the faucet drips.
Three weeks it's been dripping, ever since my landlord promised to "swing by," which in this city means sometime before the next hurricane, or never.
I lean my forehead against the window. Below, the street steams under the one working streetlamp, and a scrawny cat with half a tail slinks along the curb like he owns the block. Through the floorboards, the jazz trio downstairs works through something slow, the saxophone sliding low enough that I feel it in my heels.
I love that sound. It's the only thing in this apartment that has never asked me for money.
My apartment is charmingly bohemian if you squint.
Don't squint.
Peeling paint. Mismatched chairs. A laundry basket that achieved sentience sometime in May. But it's mine. A sanctuary from the endless parade of demanding customers and the constant math of how close I am to the edge.
It's also my laboratory.
"Okay," I tell the cat, who doesn't care. "Desperate times."
The grimoire lives under the sink behind the drain cleaner, because nobody breaks into an apartment this ugly looking for drain cleaner. I found it at a flea market two summers ago, a cracked leather relic that smelled like mildew and forgotten magic. Eight dollars. The woman who sold it had a silver tooth and told me, "That one picks its readers, chère."
I assumed it was a sales pitch.
So far the book has helped me open three stubborn jar lids, find a parking spot on Magazine Street during Jazz Fest, and make my cheating ex's phone autocorrect every single text to I'm sorry.
Small magic. Hobby magic.
Tonight, I need more than a parking spot.
I flatten the book open on the counter, and the spine cracks like a knuckle. The page for the Prosperity Charm is water-stained at one corner. The recipe is almost insulting in its simplicity.
A pinch of cinnamon for abundance.
A sprig of rosemary for remembrance of past good fortune. Cute. I'd need an actual past good fortune for that one.
And one bloom from something living, to focus the want.
The jasmine in my window box has three flowers left. I pinch the best one, and its perfume bleeds onto my fingertips, sweet and heavy and already fading.
Like my hopes. Very poetic. Very on brand.
Everything goes into the chipped blue bowl my grandmother used for snapping beans. I grab the wooden spoon.
"Just a few extra dollars," I whisper, closing my eyes. I picture my wallet with crisp bills tucked inside. "Enough to cover rent. A good tip. A stupid, generous, life-changing tip. That's all I'm asking."
I start the chant.
The words aren't English. They aren't the Latin I half-remember from Catholic school either. They have hard edges, and my tongue trips over them, then finds a rhythm, and then the rhythm finds me. I stir. My voice drops lower than I mean it to, low as the saxophone, until I can't tell where the music downstairs ends and I begin.
The hair on my arms lifts.
That's new.
Heat gathers under my sternum, a fist of it, and pushes outward. The bowl hums against the counter. My teacups start rattling on their hooks one after another, like someone's walking a finger down a row of piano keys.
In the bowl, the jasmine unfurls.
One petal. Then another. Each edge glowing white as a struck match.
Stop.
Every cell in my body screams it.
My mouth keeps going anyway.
The words pour out of me in a voice that isn't mine. Older. Deeper. A voice that knows what it's asking for, even if I don't.
The jasmine smell turns. It sours, then darkens into something cold. Wet stone. Pine sap. Snow, which makes zero sense in a Louisiana summer. Iron, like the taste of a split lip.
Downstairs, the saxophone squeals and dies.
Light erupts from the bowl in one white column and slams into my ceiling. Every shadow in the apartment flings itself against the walls. I throw my arm over my eyes. The floor bucks under my feet. Somewhere, glass shatters.
The roar in my ears sounds like wind across an ocean I've never seen.
Then nothing.
Silence so thick it presses on my eardrums.
I lower my arm.
There's a man in my kitchen.
Correction.
There's a man taking up my entire kitchen.
My ceiling is eight feet. He clears it by inches, his head bent beneath it like he's done me a personal favor by fitting in at all. White hair falls past his shoulders. Not old-man gray. Thick and pale as frost, swept back from a face that looks carved instead of born. High cheekbones. Hard mouth. A jaw shadowed in silver stubble. A scar splits his left brow and disappears beneath a black leather patch.
The other eye finds me.
Blue. Not sky blue. The blue at the bottom of a glacier, where the ice has been crushed so long the light can't get out.
My lungs quit.
He's dressed in black, a long coat that swallows the lamplight, open over a chest broad enough to block my refrigerator. Silver rings on his fingers. Runes inked up the side of his throat, vanishing under his collar.
Ancient.
Not feeble. Not wrinkled. Ancient the way the river is. Something that was here before this city and still expects to be here after.
And beautiful in a way that drops my stomach, the same lurch I get at the top of a roller coaster.
Too late to get off now.
"What fresh indignity is this?"
His voice doesn't come from his chest. It comes from under the floor. Under the city. Under the bedrock. My teacups rattle on their hooks again.
"To be ripped from my rest," he says, "from the halls of Valhalla itself, for…" His gaze sweeps my apartment. The peeling paint. The laundry basket. The stack of mail with PAST DUE stamped in red. The bra I flung over a chair. The forty-three dollars. "This?"
His lip curls.
I've been looked at by a lot of men. Drunk men. Sober men. Men who lean over the bar to read my name tag and keep their eyes a few inches too low.
This isn't that.
This is inventory.
He's taking me apart the way I counted my tips, piece by piece, deciding what each part is worth.
Heat crawls up my neck.
"I don't understand," I manage. My voice comes out a pathetic squeak. "I just… I wanted a tip."
The silence that follows has weight.
"A tip." The word drips. "You summoned me—Odin, Allfather, Weaver of Fate, Lord of Asgard—with a manifestation spell. For pocket change."
Odin.
Of course it's Odin. I knew the second I saw the eye. Seventh grade, I checked out every Norse mythology book in the Jefferson Parish library and fell asleep to documentaries about Vikings for a year straight.
None of them mentioned he was hot.
"It was supposed to be a simple spell," I say, clutching my apron like a shield. "For good fortune. Abundance."
He laughs. Harsh. No humor in it.
"Abundance, you say?" He lets his eye travel the room one more time. "If this is abundance, then Midgard is truly lost."
Okay. Rude.
Accurate. But rude.
"You could have been a really tall burglar with a light-up entrance," I hear myself say. "In which case I've got forty-three dollars and you're welcome to it."
I want to staple my mouth shut.
He goes still.
Then he moves.
One step and he's across the kitchen. My spine hits the counter edge. He doesn't touch me. He doesn't need to. He sets one hand flat on the Formica beside my hip, and his rings click against it, and the cold coming off him slides right through my thin work shirt.
This close, I see the fine lines at the corner of his eye.
Not age. Weather. A thousand winters of it.
"When you speak to me," he says, low, "you will get my name right. Say it."
My mouth goes dry. "Odin."
"Allfather."
The correction lands somewhere I don't expect.
My knees go soft. My pulse drops out of my throat and settles lower, a slow, heavy throb that matches the drip of the faucet behind him. My nipples tighten against my shirt. I'm scared, my hands are shaking, and beneath all of it something hot and humiliating rolls over and stretches like it's been waiting my whole life for a man to talk to me exactly like that.
No. Absolutely not. Down, girl.
His nostrils flare.
Oh, God.
Oh, gods. Plural. Since apparently that's my life now.
He can smell it on me.
His eye drops to my mouth. Lower. Back up. The contempt doesn't leave his face, but it shifts over to make room for something else.
"Interesting," he murmurs.
I would like to die now. I'd like the floor to open and drop me into the jazz club so a baby grand can crush me with some dignity.
"I'm not—"
"You are." Flat. A fact laid on the counter next to my forty-three dollars. "Fear and want, knotted together. Mortals were always sweetest that way."
He pushes off the counter, and the loss of his cold hits like walking out of air-conditioning into August. I sag. My lungs remember their job.
He turns to the window.
The air shifts.
The jasmine vanishes. In its place, sulfur. Rotten eggs and struck matches, so thick I gag.
One breath, and it's gone. Jasmine and wet street again, like nothing happened.
Odin's head snaps toward the glass. "Portents," he mutters. The thunder has drained out of his voice. What's left sounds grim. "The threads fray."
Outside, the city warps.
A truck rolls past, and its engine comes out deep and dragging, like something growling under the asphalt. A flock of white ibis lifts off the roof across the street and flies backward for three long seconds, wings beating wrong, before they scatter. The streetlamp flickers from yellow to an icy, pulsing blue.
Like a heartbeat.
Like something dying.
His hand closes on my windowsill. The old wood groans.
"Your careless invocation has not merely summoned me." He says it to the glass. "It has torn a hole between worlds. A wound in the weave. And wounds like that fester." He turns his head, and the blue eye pins me over his shoulder. "They invite things best left undisturbed."
My skin goes cold all over.
"I can't help you," I blurt. "I'm a waitress. My magic is a hobby. I open jar lids. You're Odin. You're a god. This is way above my pay grade. I just wanted a good tip!"
He reaches up and adjusts the leather over his eye, an absent, tired gesture, the first thing about him that looks anything close to human.
"Luck is a fickle mistress, mortal," he says. "And you have made a catastrophic miscalculation. The veil between realms is not a curtain to be drawn aside on a whim. You put your hand through it and pulled." He crosses back to me, slow this time, and I know he's letting me watch him come. Letting me feel every step. "The spell bound me through you. Your blood. Your voice. Your want. Until that binding is broken the right way, I go where you go. And the wound stays open through you."
"So I undo it. Same book. Backward."
"You cannot unmake a door you don't understand." He stops in front of me. "And you understand nothing."
He lifts a hand.
I flinch.
He waits until I'm still, and the waiting is worse than any touch would've been.
Then two cold fingers slide beneath my chin and tip my face up.
I thought I was afraid before.
I didn't know anything.
"Understand this, Brittany Tutor."
He knows my name. I never told him my name.
"I am not here for your wishes." His thumb drags along my jaw, and every nerve in my face follows it like a dog on a leash. "I did not choose you. I do not want you. I want my hall and my sleep and my ravens. Instead I have a cramped room that smells of fried shrimp and a girl who trembles when I say her name."
I swallow.
His fingers feel it.
"But you belong to the binding now. And the binding belongs to me." His voice drops so quiet I have to lean in to hear it, and I hate that I lean in. "You will do as I say, when I say it. Without the chatter."
"And if I don't?" I whisper.
Something ancient looks out of that eye. Older than the river. Older than the word no.
"Then the door stays open," he says, "and your city learns what the end of the world tastes like." His thumb presses once at the hinge of my jaw. "And I'll still be here, little witch. Watching you learn it."
He lets go.
I stand with my back against the counter and my heart slamming my ribs and a line of fire burning where his thumb used to be.
Forty-three dollars sits by my elbow.
The faucet drips.
Downstairs, the saxophone starts up again. Slow. Wrong. Dragging like a funeral march for someone who hasn't died yet.
I asked the universe for a tip.
The universe sent me a master.
And the worst part, the part I will never say out loud, not to him, not to anyone, is the warm, shameful throb that hasn't stopped since he said belongs to me.
