The Viking's Witch Read online

  THE VIKING’S WITCH

  Although her sister has pulled up stakes and moved her family to the psychic community of Norseton, Marty Petersen doesn’t believe she’ll fit in with them. She belongs in familiar Florida, and not in the desert amidst a clan of thoroughly modern Vikings.

  Afótama clansman Chris Holst doesn’t agree. He’s been dreaming of Marty for nearly a year and knows she’s meant to be his. He doesn’t want her to leave Norseton before he’s had his chance to bond with her in the way of their kind, but he understands why she’d be afraid. Her father is the clan’s most notorious fraud, and the blowback from his imminent expulsion could upset the single mom’s already shaky situation. He’s willing to stand at her side and hold her hand until the turmoil subsides, but she has to let him into her life first.

  If Marty can’t break free from the depressive grip of the lies that have suppressed her for so many years, she won’t be able to take what’s hers. She could wield the magic of the Afótama, and more importantly, she could claim the worthy man who is rightfully hers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dr. Chris Holst grabbed the patient intake form from the stand outside the emergency room stall and, swaying abruptly to the right, tossed it back into the holder. He slammed his palms against the adjacent wall, nearly thrashing his face in the process.

  “What the hell?”

  Either his blood sugar level had just had a precipitous drop, or some careless psychic nearby was practicing a new parlor trick. Normally, he would have had good reason to blame the latter.

  It was eleven a.m., and with the exception of a thirty-minute catnap at around four a.m., he’d been moving nonstop since midnight. He’d drawn the short straw and had ended up on split shifts, the second of which was twelve hours long. He couldn’t really say no. There was a sudden physician shortage in Norseton. The population had surged since Queen Tess’s return to the witchy clan in New Mexico right as a couple of elderly doctors decided to enter semi-retirement.

  His body fell forward yet again as his vision darkened. Clutching the wall, he breathed slowly, in and out. When he was twelve, he’d managed not to pass out that time his sister “accidentally” impaled him in the thigh with an arrow from her crossbow. Apparently, the pain like a million hot pokers in his flesh couldn’t drop him onto his ass, but a bit of sudden-onset psychic hypersensitivity could.

  Shit.

  “Sorry. One more minute,” he said to the waiting patient.

  He staggered rightward and gripped the rail beneath the light switch.

  Shit.

  He’d never felt so wrecked before, and he’d done his undergrad at the number three party school in the United States.

  “Mommy, it hurts to move my wrist,” came a young, tearful voice from the other side of the curtain.

  “Damn,” he whispered as he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. If his vision hadn’t been blurring, he might have read that the patient was a minor. He’d only scanned enough of the form to make sure the person wasn’t bleeding or in imminent risk of organ failure.

  Widening his stance a little to compensate for his wildly fluctuating equilibrium, he gritted his teeth and pulled in a deep breath.

  Occasionally, the Afótama clan’s matriarch—the queen’s grandmother Muriel—sensed physical ailments of the people in the community, and tossed a little energy their way to help them heal. Usually, he did everything in his power to stay off the radar of the folks in the executive mansion, but he was too tired to remember why that was.

  Come on. Give me a little something, Muriel.

  Either she’d caught his psychic ping, or the placebo effect was working just as well as magic, because his vision cleared and the throb behind his eyes ebbed somewhat.

  “Coming in now,” he called through the curtain. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” came the strained voice.

  He checked behind him for the nurse and, seeing she was close, he pulled the curtain aside and read the top sheet of the intake form as he trudged into the space. “Sorry about the wait. Always super busy in the ER around the full moon.”

  He clucked his tongue as he read. The patient was Shani Quan, and she was six years old. She didn’t even have an entry set up in the computer system yet. He rarely dealt with paper anymore. The hospital had gone green with records for the most part, but I.T. was switching to a new system that was still supported by the software company.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “What’s the full moon have to do with anything?”

  He walked to the counter at the side of the room to set down the paperwork, squinting at the line noting her arrival time as he went. She’d been there for nearly two hours—an unacceptable wait time in a hospital as efficient as Norseton’s usually was.

  “Oh, it’s just a superstition. Some folks believe that people are unluckier around the full moon. With nights like last night, I start to think they’re right. Had some of the craziest stuff happen during my shift.”

  “Like what?”

  “Can’t tell you, sweetie. Doctor-patient confidentiality.” He tossed the folder onto the counter and, fixing a smile onto his face, turned to look at his young patient.

  And he looked right past her as if his eyes were magnets and there was a column of iron in the corner behind her.

  The placebo effect he’d been counting on to get him through the last hour of his shift vanished in a flash.

  Magic radiated off the woman in the corner like exhaust out of a muffler, and it was dark, repellent, and dizzying.

  Low blood sugar hadn’t been his problem. She had been. They hadn’t met before, but he knew her.

  “It’s you,” he whispered.

  The woman was a stranger to the clan, but not to his dreams. For ten months, she’d been a figment of his imagination. She wasn’t a phantom in his dreamscape after all. She was a real woman with powerful magic and a scowl just as vicious.

  “Gods.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Who are you?”

  “What does that have to do with my daughter’s arm?”

  “Your daughter?” There hadn’t been a kid in his dreams.

  She narrowed her dark eyes, tightened her full pink lips into a flat line, and expelled a breath in an exasperated burst. “Are you the doctor? We’ve been waiting in here for a long time.”

  Her voice was low and husky, but he’d always imagined it would be. In his dreams, she’d never spoken. She’d smiled. Touched.

  So much touching, and in all the sinful ways he’d craved. In his dreams, he hadn’t been afraid to ask…or to receive.

  The Afótama had to be careful about who they allowed to get close. Intimate touch always left a psychic memory, and some memories were harder to shake than others.

  When he’d returned to Norseton with his roommate, Paul, Chris had started to hope that perhaps the dreams were more than that. When the gods favored a person of Afótama lineage, they sent images of their fated partners. The clan chieftain Oliver had been the first in a generation to have the visions. As soon as Chris had heard, he’d hoped he’d be so lucky.

  He hoped that the visions that came later weren’t just teases constructed by his imagination.

  And there she was—his future love—standing ramrod straight next to an exam table, scowling, and holding the hand of a little girl who writhed in pain.

  “The doctor…” he said lamely.

  He could hardly think. Whatever kind of magic she was putting off was unlike anything he’d ever sensed before. Proximity to most Afótama elicited a tingle, at best. That lady could have melted his damned eyebrows off. Her power was hot and repulsive. Not even Queen Tess put off a crackle like that, but she purpose
fully restrained her magic. Either the lady before him chose to punish him or she didn’t realize that she was punishing him.

  “Doctor what?” she asked.

  “Sorry.” He turned his employee badge over so she could read the front. “Holst, in case you want to make a complaint. Make sure they know you’re talking about me and not my father, though. He’s most certainly on a golf course right now.”

  He’d meant the statement as a joke, but she didn’t look amused.

  Neither did Shani, but fortunately, the child looked more confused than in pain.

  He rolled the stool over to the side of the bed and leaned one knee onto it while putting his elbows against the hard mattress. “Can you tell me what happened, Shani?”

  “I fell at the playground. Mommy says I might have broken my arm.”

  “Did she, now?” The woman of his dreams had a kid, but no wedding ring.

  The toxic psychic energy she’d been putting off tapered. She let out a ragged exhalation and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I was right there. She—”

  “I jumped off the swing!” Shani interjected. “I was so high!” She threw up both arms, and then yipped, pulling the obviously dud limb against her body tenderly.

  “Careful.” Ever so lightly, he ran his fingers along the underside of the arm Shani was favoring. He needed to draw on his thirty-five years of practice at pushing the magic shit back so he could concentrate on the other thing he’d walked into that room to practice—medicine. Even teenagers in the Afótama clan were able to tune out most of the noise. It was the very first skill they learned once their telepathy strengthened at puberty.

  He didn’t read any magic off Shani, but that was normal. Kids normally didn’t put off much, if any, and given the fact she was obviously of mixed Afótama heritage, there was a chance she would never have any.

  “You brought a bit of playground in with you, huh? You’ve got a lot of sand stuck to you.”

  “I’d just put sunscreen on her,” her mother said. “Hadn’t had a chance to absorb before she ran off.”

  “It was a contest!” Shani said. “Who could swing fifty times and slide ten times the fastest.”

  “Who was winning?” Chris asked.

  “Please don’t get her started,” her mother said.

  “Sorry. I’m awful sometimes.” He chuckled and went to the cabinet to get sterile saline to rinse the sand off and a basin to catch the water.

  Quan, he mused as he rooted through drawers for supplies.

  Quan certainly wasn’t like the Viking names the Afótama tended to have, and she didn’t resemble one in the slightest bit. She had dark, slanted eyes. Monolid, like her father’s, perhaps. Everything else was like her mother. The coarseness of her hair, the wide mouth, the proud nose.

  Quarter-Afótama, maybe. Her mother had to be half. Even with the amount of magic she had pouring off her, she couldn’t be full-blooded. Her brownness precluded such.

  “Did you just move here?” he asked, trying for a casual tone, even if his curiosity was making him breathless as hell. He wanted to know everything about her. His dreams hadn’t told him anything about who she was, only what she looked like, and that she was his.

  Is she mine?

  She didn’t seem to show any recognition of him at all, but he didn’t know if that meant anything. He had no idea if Queen Tess ever dreamed of Oliver before they met.

  “It’s just, I recognize most folks on sight,” he said when she didn’t immediately respond.

  “My aunt did,” Shani answered for her. “She works at the mansion.”

  “Yeah?”

  Of course she does.

  If her aunt’s magic was as pronounced as Shani’s mother’s, working close to the queen was something of a given. The clan royals always kept the folks with the most magic closest.

  Keeping his gaze averted from the lady on the other side of the bed, he took Shani’s forearm gently in his hands and draped it over a basin. “I’m going to rinse off the sand so I can see your skin better, but can you point to where you hurt most?”

  “You’re not gonna touch it, are you?” Without waiting for his answer, Shani pointed.

  Brave kid.

  “No, I’m not going to touch you yet. I’m going to try not to make you hurt any more than you already are, but if I have to put you back together, I might have to give you a pill first and then have you come back. Then I’d have to make you hurt just a little bit more for a minute. But then the pain’ll stop.”

  She narrowed her eyes skeptically, and he smiled because when she did that, she looked like Fry from the Futurama cartoon.

  “Hey, I don’t blame you for not trusting me.” He rinsed the arm, and beyond a couple of expected scrapes and blue bruises, didn’t see anything unusual. “I didn’t trust doctors when I was a kid, either, and my father was one.”

  “I don’t know what my father does besides nothing.”

  “Shani.” Her mother covered her eyes and groaned.

  Chris somehow managed to suppress the snort he didn’t think her mother would appreciate hearing. The guy being a deadbeat would suit Chris just fine. Because Chris was Afótama, he hoped he was. If Chris had just come face-to-face with his fated match, he needed her completely unattached.

  The people he knew who had gods-ordained matches had all said the same thing—that he’d know. There’d be no question, and he’d want to do everything in his power to settle her into his life. The sureness hit him like the sun coming out after a long period of cold cloudiness.

  Of course she’s mine. Fuck, she’s so pretty.

  At the whisper of the curtains behind him, he turned to see the ER nurse Calla finally stepping into the space.

  Calla cleared her throat, and waved him over, ostensibly so she could whisper.

  That wasn’t necessary. Most Afótama were proficient telepaths, but discretion often required a connection only touch could forge.

  Calla touched his shoulder and whispered through his mind. “The matriarch just called. She wants to know what’s wrong with Shani.”

  “You kidding me?” He cut his gaze to the child, who was receiving a silent, but probably very effective, warning glare from her mother. Mrs. Quan’s expression could have rendered a less bold child to mush.

  “Muriel caught wind of that already?” he projected to Calla.

  “I think Queen Tess did first, and she told her grandmother. Queen Tess has apparently met Shani before.”

  “When?”

  “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that she was aware of the injury, and Muriel was, too. Shani can’t psychically shield her distress the way older Afótama can, and probably doesn’t even know she could be able to.”

  “She’s a child. No one should be psychically picking up on her discomfort.”

  “Except for Queen Tess.”

  Queenie had a unique skill set. The normal rules didn’t apply to her. “Shit.” He cut his gaze sideways and watched for a moment as Shani’s mother dried the child’s forearm.

  “What’s the diagnosis?” Calla asked.

  “Not certain. I need to send Shani downstairs to get an X-ray.”

  “Okay. Just know you need to be on your Ps and Qs. I’m certain this is a case Queenie will follow up on personally.”

  “Great.” Chris groaned inwardly.

  Calla stepped outside a couple of feet, clutching her wrist with the opposite hand and smiling serenely. Ready to be on hand if he needed her, apparently.

  He turned back to the waiting patient and her mother.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, helping the child down from the bed and carefully avoiding her arm. “Head on down to radiology with Calla. I doubt there’s a wait there now, so let them go ahead and get a look at your bones so we know what we’re dealing with. I’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

  Shani looked to Chris with uncertainty. She’d have to put her trust in yet another person. Afótama children tended to be trusting in general, but Sh
ani wasn’t quite Afótama.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “I promise, they’re just going to take a picture of the inside of your arm. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Trust me, that’s one of the few things I am sure of today.”

  She propped the fist of her good arm onto her hip, and jutted the bony thing out.

  Spunky little thing.

  “Did you go to school to be a doctor?” she asked.

  “Yes. For a very long time.”

  “My auntie’s a nurse.”

  “Is she, now?”

  Shani nodded sagely.

  Chris furrowed his brow. “At the mansion? But—”

  Before he could broach a follow-up question, Calla hustled Shani and her mother out of the room.

  Normally, he would have taken a moment to make some notes on her chart. Instead, he hurried into the tiny office the doctors sometimes used to quickly gobble snacks or give themselves pep talks and grabbed the phone’s receiver off the base.

  He was starving, but not for food—information.

  He stabbed the memorized sequence of numbers into the keypad and waited for his neighbor to answer his cell phone.

  “Will Valle.”

  “Will, this is Chris. Quick question.”

  “Must be an important one if you’re calling from the hospital.”

  “Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty important. I know you’ve been keeping track of the population here and studying magic types, but what I need you to tell me sort of falls more in the line of gossip than professional curiosity.”

  “Oh, shit. What do you want to know?”

  “Is there a new nurse at the mansion?”

  “Is that all? Well, damn, I’m surprised you didn’t hear. Mallory’s been here for a few weeks. She lives in our building, dude.”

  “No she fucking doesn’t. I would have seen her. There’s no way I could have ignored fresh meat living on our block, even with the hours I keep.” And especially not if she looks like her sister.

  “Mal keeps pretty busy,” Will said. “She’s the primary caregiver for the queen’s brother.”

  “Damn, that explains it. Keith’s got a list of physical ailments as long as my forearm. She probably never goes home to sleep.”