Woman King (5 page)

“OK,” I said, swallowing hard at what was
unfolding. “What do I have to do?”

Elsa smiled. “I am glad you asked.”

****

Elsa asked me either to close my business or
take a leave of absence. Both suggestions seemed too dramatic, so I
put her off, saying I would start with a vacation. I informed my
remaining clients I would be out again for several weeks. Then I
called my staff and apologized profusely for being out of touch,
giving them all modest pay raises as encouragement to stay on and
manage things while I was away.

My home has three bedrooms. Besides mine, one
is an office that I use when I work from home rather than downtown,
and the other is a smallish guest room with a double bed. I gave
that room to Elsa, complete with a fresh set of sheets and a
tutorial on how to use the remote control for the small television
perched on a table inside. It was obvious that wherever Elsa
normally spent the bulk of her time, cable was not available.

I went to bed that night and slept soundly
for the first time in weeks. My peace was short-lived, though, when
I was awakened at 6 am the following morning by Elsa, who stood
looming above me, a pair of my running shoes in her hands.

“Up!” she said. “It’s time to begin your
training.”

I mumbled something about it being too early
and rolled over. This time she pulled the blankets off and let the
cold air roll over me. I shot up and tried to pull the blankets
back, but Elsa was not budging.

“Up!” she repeated. “You need to get into
fighting shape.”

“Where are we going?”

“I did a little scouting while you were
asleep last night. There is a place nearby where we can begin our
work.”

“Are you going to feed me to the lions?” I
grumbled.

Elsa snorted. “I am not quite that old, if
that is what you were implying. Besides they would not have fed
their seer, possibly their local healer, to the lions.”

That caught my attention. I didn’t know
anything about Elsa or where she had come from. For all I knew, she
did live when the Romans built their coliseums. She seemed to know
I had a few questions on the tip of my tongue because she quickly
cut me off. “Later. I will answer your questions when we
return.”

Not long afterwards, I was staring at a steep
set of steps inside Kezar Stadium, an old football stadium located
nearby.

“You want me to run the stairs? Why?”

“When I was your age I could ride a horse for
miles while holding a crossbow,” Elsa said, her hands on her hips.
“ I’ve fired a rifle from horseback while hunting with my tribe.
Can you do that?”

I shook my head, trying not to laugh at the
image of me with a crossbow.

“You need to get into fighting shape to
protect yourself,” Elsa chirped. “After a few weeks with the demon,
I fear you’ve lost some of your energy.”

“I have no need to shoot anything from the
back of a horse,” I barked back. “I can’t see how this will help me
at all.”

“Just run the stairs,” Elsa deadpanned. “I
will see you at the top.”

This was too ridiculous. Hunt. Ride a horse.
I was a modern woman. I rode public transportation. It was with
that kind of mindset that I prepared to walk away. But where would
I go? I had asked Elsa to stay, and more importantly, I hated to
abandon a challenge. How hard could it be to run the stairs?

I took off with gusto. The first few steps
seemed easy. “Piece of cake,” I mused privately. As I climbed
higher, however, my legs began to quiver. Then they began to ache,
my hamstring muscles burning like a match to the strip on the box.
I gasped for air, unsteady as my legs began to wobble. As I was
nearing the top of the steps, I tripped and missed breaking my nose
on the corner of one of the wooden benches by mere millimeters. I
barely managed to pull myself upright, still gasping for air.

As I sat down to collect myself, I watched
Elsa, decked out in a pair of my yoga pants, come running up the
stairs. She was not out of breath when she reached the top. I hid
my face as she approached.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “I didn’t
do that to humiliate you. But I did want to make a point. You need
to know your body and know your emotions. The best way to do that
is to be physically fit. Being fit also gives you mental endurance,
and you will need those skills when you allow your gifts to
return.”

“I think I might throw up,” was my brilliant
reply.

“By all means,” Elsa said in response, “But
when you’re finished you need to run the stairs again. We’re going
to be out here every day until you can do this easily.”

“Why?”

“I outlasted my enemies because I rode
harder, rode faster and rode farther,” Elsa said. “Endurance is
everything in war.”

“War,” I said, a shiver running up my spine.
“I’m not at war.”

“Do you want your career back? You will have
to stand up to the demon and Stoner Halbert to do it. That is not
something that can happen without work. Think of it this way. I
have been watching television and the men of your era seem to like
fit women. It is easy to distract men using physical beauty. It
will give you one more skill to use to your advantage.”

It was not the motivational speech one would
normally hear from a personal trainer, but it worked. And so, my
training began, and in those first few days, Elsa and I settled
into a comfortable schedule. We exercised for several hours each
morning before returning home. The city, it turned out, was a
wonderful boot camp, with endless hills to climb, many lined with
hidden staircases. We drove to Crissy Field and ran the path to the
Golden Gate Bridge. After a few weeks, I was able to run across the
bridge as a part of my regimen. My afternoons were left open, and I
spent that time running errands, touching base with my office and
working in the garden.

Although I was feeling better, I wondered
what Elsa had in store for me next. She’d asked me not to tell Lily
about her, and so far, I had honored her request. Lily was pretty
busy with her own life, but eventually she would want to spend time
together. One afternoon as Elsa and I were having tea—she’d banned
coffee from my diet—I asked if I could see Lily.

“Not yet,” was her reply.

“Why?”

“Because you need to focus,” she said in a
schoolteacher’s voice. “If you bring your friend into this, she
will only distract you.”

“Distract me from what? It seems as if your
work is almost done here,” I said, feeling confident. “I am
exercising, I feel great.”

“We are a long way from being done,” Elsa
said. “This is simply the conditioning you need to get physically
ready. We have yet to unlock your senses and see how they
work.”

“No,” I said. “How can allowing myself to
feel more possibly help?”

“You will not help yourself by remaining
ignorant,” Elsa said. “The reason you feel well is because I’m
here, and because you’re not in the direct path of the demon. The
minute you step back into your office, you will experience the same
problems again.”

I didn’t know what to say. I did feel better
and I was growing used to Elsa, although I knew next to nothing
about this woman living in my guest room.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “I know
you said my grandmother summoned you, but why do you have to
stay?”

“I don’t
have
to stay,” she countered.
“But as a spirit guide, my job is to help you escape danger. My
work isn’t finished yet. And, I have business with the Council that
keeps me here.”

“So you aren’t necessarily staying for me,” I
said, certain there was something she wasn’t telling me.

“Why are you so anxious to see me leave?”
Elsa asked. “We have much work to do. I sense you have a great
power, Olivia,” she said. “I feel the energy in you. But you are in
danger as long as you fail to use your instincts to see what is
happening around you.”

“I’m afraid,” I said. “This gift you keep
referring to has made my mother’s life difficult. I don’t want to
become like her.”

“Mother, father, sister, brother,” Elsa said
shaking her head. “We cannot escape the bonds of our family, their
blood is our blood.”

“I don’t have any of those except my mother.
I never knew my father and my grandparents are dead.”

Once again, Elsa paused for a moment as if
she were acknowledging something important in my statement. “Your
gift is passed through the women in your family, so it matters
little about the rest. My mother was a shaman in our village, as
was her mother before her. These skills pass through one generation
to the next. One day, you will have a daughter.”

“Stop,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m not
getting married. I’m not having a child. Look at me. My life is out
of control. I am having a conversation in my kitchen with a ghost
about how to beat the devil at his own game. How on earth can you
talk about a future with marriage and children?”

Elsa looked amused, but not in a good way.
“Technically, I am not a ghost and I have never seen anyone beat
the devil at his own game,” she said. “You are nowhere near ready
to do that. I am asking that you take responsibility for your own
life and use the tools you were given. By all the goddesses of the
known world, I have never seen anyone reject her bloodline so
readily. This wasn’t a choice when I was your age. People in my
tribe, in my village, depended on my mother to seek out the spirits
to learn about the harvest, to heal the sick and protect our
elders.”

“What about you,” I asked, angry at her
lecture. “What did they depend on you for?”

Elsa turned her head away from me slightly.
For the first time since she’d revealed herself to me, I could see
hesitation. It seemed that she too had secrets.

“We are alike in many ways Olivia,” she
continued. “I did not reject my skills when I was your age, but I
did not manage them well, either. I wanted to do more than help old
men bring in good crops for the village. So I began to dabble in
things that were beyond my measure.”

Elsa got up from the bar stool and began to
pace around the kitchen.

“Eventually, I left my village in search of
someone or someplace where I could learn how to gain more power. I
was not content to see the future; I wanted to control it. After
much searching, I found an old witch who promised to help me gain
introduction to a school of magic where I could learn the secrets
of casting powerful spells to control things… nature, the
weather.”

“So you wanted to be a powerful witch?”

“I wanted power,” Elsa said. “I had no
specific occupation in mind.”

“Did you find the school?”

Elsa nodded, but her face was grim. “The
scholomance
was in the mountains of Romania. It was very
remote. I began my journey in the fall. It took more than a day to
reach the top of the mountain and find the castle.”

“And…?”

“The witch was true to her word,” Elsa said.
“She sent me to the door of a school where all things dark could be
learned. I should have been more cautious, but I was eager to begin
my lessons. I knocked upon a large wooden door with a raven
engraved on the front. After some time, an elderly man dressed as a
servant opened the door. He confirmed it was a school, but said
they only accepted ten students at a time. At first I thought he
was sending me away, but then he said that I had arrived just in
time and would be the tenth student. He instructed me to secure my
horse in the stables nearby and return to the castle. Excited, I
quickly did as I was told. As I walked back toward the school, an
angel appeared on the branch of a tree next to me.”

I raised an eyebrow, but did not
interrupt.

“The angel called out to me by name, and
implored me to not enter the castle. He told me it was the house of
the devil, and that of the ten students chosen, one would have to
stay behind and be sent to hell as payment for the lessons. The
angel was certain I would be the one to make good on the debt, and
he urged me to reclaim my horse and ride away from the castle that
very moment.”

“Did you leave?” I asked, caught up in her
remarkable tale.

“I was eager to become more powerful, but I
did not want to give my soul to the devil. I agreed to leave with
the angel. As I turned to retrieve my horse, the door of the castle
swung open. The servant I spoke with was there again, but this
time, he was dressed in the clothing of a gentleman. I realized I
had been conversing with the devil himself the entire time.”

At this point I was speechless. The devil?
Was she joking with me to make a point?

Elsa sensed my skepticism. “If you decide to
continue with your training, you will come to see that there is
more to this world than meets the eye. I didn’t believe I would
ever stand toe-to-toe with the devil until that day, either.”

“Go on,” I urged.

“The devil asked us both if we would like to
come inside for a cup of tea. The angel laughed and said ‘you know
very well that I will not walk through those doors.’ ”

“‘Then I will come to you,’ the devil said. I
had seen many evil spirits in my time as a shaman, but I had never
felt such evil as I did when he approached us. He was standing as
close to me as I am to you. By knocking on his door, he said, I had
already offered myself to him. The angel replied that he had been
watching the school for more than 100 years and knew very well that
until I crossed the threshold, I was not subject to the devil’s
contract.”

I have to admit, she had captured my
attention. I motioned rapidly with my hand to continue.

“To my surprise, the devil asked the angel if
he would take a walk with him. I did not know at the time, but it
seems that the devil enjoys making deals and negotiations. Testing
the intellect of his opponents gives him great pleasure.