Thief Eyes - Janni Lee Simner [50]
“You’ll run up my bill with all these overseas calls.” Ari gave a wry smile. “The country code is—one, right?” He dialed and put the phone to his ear. “Hello?” he said in English. “I would like to order a medium pepperoni and puffin pizza.” He waited, then shut the phone and spoke in Icelandic. “She said I was very funny. The operator.”
I let out a long breath. “Muninn’s wrong. We’re not forgotten by everyone.”
“No,” Ari said. “Only by everyone I know except you and some friends on the Internet.”
“Oh.” Of course. I could go back to the States, to Jared and my grandparents and my other friends at school, but what about Ari? There was no only Iceland for him—this was his home. “Maybe you could call your mom from the U.S. Maybe she’d hear you from there. We could take the coin away with us.” Would that end Hallgerd’s spell, and douse my own fire as well? Maybe all we needed to do was leave, and everything would be okay. “We could sneak onto a plane. No one would see us.”
“Not until we land.” Ari’s steps crunched over the dirt road. “How would you explain me to U.S. Customs?”
“Well, you’d have to get a passport, but—”
“I have a passport.” Ari looked down at his hands. “How would you explain if I’m not human when we land? What do you think an angry polar bear would do to an airplane, anyway?” He laughed uneasily. “Bear on a plane. It’s like a movie.”
Images of the bears in national parks, tearing the roofs off cars to get at coolers, flashed through my head. We didn’t even know what made Ari change into a bear. Was it when he got angry, like with Svan? Anger seemed to feed the fire in me as well. “Maybe the bear spell will end, too, if we leave. We should call Jared, anyway. Let him know what’s going on.” Jared should have called us back by now.
Ari handed me the phone. I dialed, but it went straight to voice mail. Maybe Jared’s battery died. Or maybe he’s still talking to Dad.
We reached another road, right at the edge of a deep blue fjord. Fog hung over the water, though the sky above was clear. We turned right again, following the fjord inland. The fog thickened.
“So your boyfriend,” Ari asked abruptly. “What’s he like?”
“He’s—” I hadn’t told Ari he was my boyfriend. Then again, you didn’t exactly say “love you” to a casual acquaintance. “He’s Jared,” I said. It’s none of your business, I thought. Yeah, right. When you kiss someone and hold his hand and then he finds out you have a boyfriend, he’s going to be just a little bit curious. People are funny that way. “Jared and I—we’ve known each other forever. Since the third grade, anyway.”
Ari raised a pale eyebrow. “You’ve had a boyfriend since the third grade?”
“No!” A flush crawled up my face. “We only started dating this year, but we’ve been best friends since we were little kids.” Jared had always been there, just like Mom and Dad. We talked about everything. I thought of his serious brown eyes when he listened to me. I thought of the way his T-shirt clung to his sweaty skin on the soccer field, and my face grew hot. I forced my thoughts back to the road and the thickening fog. The air felt damp against my neck and face, and I could only see a few feet ahead of us now. “So, you have many girlfriends?” I asked Ari. Maybe he had someone waiting in Reykjavik for him, too, someone he couldn’t call because of Muninn’s spell.
“Oh sure, hundreds of girlfriends,” Ari said. I looked at him, and he gave a wry laugh. “No, actually, I’m between girlfriends right now.”
“How long—”
“Have I been between girlfriends?” Ari paused, as if thinking about that. “Roughly—sixteen years, yeah.”
“Wait, you haven’t—” Was that his first kiss? I glanced at him, at the way his white bangs fell into his face. I thought of the worried look in his eyes when I woke up, not remembering who he was. “I find that hard to believe,” I said.
Ari seemed suddenly very interested in the road beneath his feet. “The girls I’ve asked out didn’t share your point of view.” He shrugged uncomfortably, but then a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, you can’t write good