Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (38 page)

Before Mimir can even respond, Loki pulls the staff from Hoenir’s hands and starts moving towards the floor. Behind him Loki can hear Hoenir snort. At the top of the staff Mimir says loudly, “Well, it’s not like I can refuse, is it?”

Across the room Loki sees Thor’s face go red. Loki smiles with all his teeth and steps with Mimir into the line of dancers, twirling the staff as he does so. From the crowd he hears laughter and cries of “fool,” but imagining what he’ll do with six months of a princeling’s allowance more than makes up for it.

“I say, Loki,” says Mimir. “This actually isn’t half bad. I can see so much this way. Spin me again!”

Now that Loki’s technically fulfilled the requirements of his wager he could quit, but seeing Thor’s furious glare across the hall is just too priceless to let go. He dances with Mimir, spins him, dips him, catches the staff on his foot, and tips it back up into his hands.

“I say,” says Mimir, “dip me again! I didn’t realize the frescoes on the ceiling had changed. I miss being able to bend my neck...”

Loki grins, even though the hall is filling with raucous laughter at his expense. The music gets louder and faster. The torches start to flicker madly, the fires in their pits send sparks shooting up into the air, and then the laughter takes on a nervous edge and someone screams.

“Or maybe we should stop,” says Mimir.

The music is slowing anyway. Loki tilts Mimir back for a final, proper dip and as he bows, Mimir’s staff in hand, he hears curses and shouts, but above it all the sound of one set of hands clapping.

Loki looks up and there is Anganboða not two paces away, clapping happily. “Well done!” she says, smiling at him. He does not smile back. She is so beautiful and so close. He wants to go to her, to smile in return, but she has the eye of Baldur and he knows who will win in such a contest. The effort it takes to stifle his natural impulses makes his lips twist into a frown; his body flushes with heat and rage.

Screams rise in the hall. Anganboða turns, and Loki follows her gaze. Sparks of fire are jumping madly from candles and the fire pits. Loki’s mouth opens in surprise, and his rage cools a bit just as the sparks subside.

“Oh, dear,” says Mimir.

Baldur and Anganboða’s brother are suddenly at her side, steering her away.

Loki watches them go, his face a mask of indifference. And then beside him he hears Odin’s voice. “I grow weary of playing politics. I need a drink. Come with us, Loki.”

Loki turns and there is Hoenir and Odin. A drink sounds like a very good idea.

Away from the party, in Odin’s own rooms, one drink turns into a few. Loki manages to lose all the money he won from Thor in a wager over a chess game while he is only slightly drunk.

...and then he proceeds to win it all back — and a rather nice guest house thrown in for good measure, while he is incredibly, mind-bendingly drunk during a second chess match.

His head is lying on the board and he hears Mimir nagging with Odin somewhere far, far, far, off in the distance. “It’s your fault! You should never have played him while he was so drunk. You had to know with those odds he’d win! Now look, you’re all drunk...Hoenir, don’t animate the chess pieces! You know they’ll squabble and cause all sorts of trouble — and you haven’t given them mouths! You’ve doomed them to die!”

Loki hears Odin guffaw and Hoenir snort. Loki manages to raise his head. The chess pieces are sliding at each other and not paying attention to the rules of the board at all. He drops his head again.

“Come on, Hoenir,” says Mimir. “Let’s take Loki home...you’re less drunk than he is...Well then, heal yourself...I don’t care if you don’t want to be sober!”

Loki feels a hand slap his back, and then suddenly his head stops spinning and the world comes into focus. The chess pieces are knocking one another off the board, Odin has his hand on Hoenir’s shoulder, and they’re both laughing hysterically. Mimir’s staff is propped against the wall. For his part, Mimir looks extremely put out.

Loki sits up and meets Odin’s unblinking eye. Odin points his finger at him and laughs, “Ha! You get to be the responsible one for once! Take Hoenir home or I’ll lift my eye patch and give you a fright!”

At that Hoenir snickers with such force he falls off his stool. The stool promptly hops backwards and begins to scamper around like a small dog.

“Loki, let’s go before Hoenir animates something dangerous,” Mimir mutters.

Suddenly noticing the wide array of weapons decorating the walls of Odin’s private chamber, Loki gets off his chair and slides one of Hoenir’s arms under his shoulder. With the other hand he grabs Mimir’s staff. They leave Odin talking with the chess pieces, idly patting Hoenir’s stool.

“Well, that was just like old times,” Mimir says as they make their way down a long hallway past Odin’s guard. Loki can’t be bothered to respond. Hoenir is heavy. Also, Loki is watching for signs that he will throw up.

Loki decides to cut through the guest wing of the palace. There is a servants’ corridor and exit that will let them out closer to Hoenir’s hut than the front or back entrance. He is passing through some long unremarkable corridor when he hears a female voice echoing down the hall. “For so long you have said my honor was my most important possession, and now you want me to give it away to some so-called-golden prince so that you may rise in power!”

It takes a moment for Loki to realize it is Anganboða’s voice. And another moment more to comprehend what she is saying. So-called-golden prince? She is not smitten? He must have heard wrong. He finds himself stopping, his hands tightening on Mimir’s staff. There is a sound like a slap and then a door slams. Loki watches as Anganboða’s brother strides off down the hall in the opposite direction, passing by another servant as he does.

That servant meets Loki’s eyes. In his hands, Mimir whispers, “There really is nothing you can do at this point that won’t make the lady’s situation worse.”

Loki frowns but continues slowly on his way.

By the time he reaches the small door that exits to the garden, he doesn’t think his mood can get worse. There is a lantern by the door that he gives to Mimir to hold in his teeth, and then they step out into the night and Loki realizes it’s raining. Soon Loki is wet and chilled and Hoenir is getting heavier and heavier, and less and less cooperative. It would be better if Loki could swing him over his shoulder, but he also has to tote Mimir along.

Loki thinks of Odin warm and drunk and happy in his rooms and scowls. He hates being the responsible one.

Head bent over, he continues on. The rain picks up, and they’re just turning into a walkway lined with long hedges when Mimir mumbles through the lantern handle in his mouth. “‘ook!”

Loki looks up; a hooded figure is pressed against the hedge. Whoever it is doesn’t seem to be aware of their approach until they are nearly upon them, and then the figure turns. The hood spills off and Loki and Mimir are facing a very red-eyed Anganboða.

“What are you doing here?” he says, the words harsher than he intends.

“Is it any of your business?” she says.

Loki stares at her and he knows. “You’re running away,” he says. At least temporarily. From Baldur. Maybe from her family.

She doesn’t deny it.

He twists his hands on Mimir’s staff. Choosing to run away in the rain, probably without a plan, or without really knowing where she was going...She’s obviously a bit mad.

The right thing for Loki to do, if he values his position at court, is to convince her to go back to the palace, grit her teeth, and allow Baldur’s “affections.”

He holds out Mimir’s staff to her and says, “You can come with us.” Apparently Loki can only be responsible to a point.

She takes the staff, looks up at Mimir and says, “Would you like me to take the lantern?”

“Yesh!” says the head, dropping it from his mouth into her hands.

It was quite nice of her to think of Mimir that way. For some reason it irritates him. Swinging the nearly unconscious Hoenir over his shoulder, he begins to walk away. A few paces later he turns back. Anganboða hasn’t moved.

“You need not worry about your honor. You have my oath it is safe with me,” Loki says, the words spilling out before he even thinks about them.

She tilts her head and then says, “I trust you.” And she does. Loki has a rather keen sense for disambiguation. She’s definitely mad.

Heaving a breath, she says, “But it doesn’t seem to matter what you do, it’s what people say you do...”

“Ahem,” says Mimir. “Consider me your chaperone.”

Looking up at the head, Anganboða’s lips part. Those very wide, generous lips. Loki can’t help but stare.

Why did he just make an oath to protect her honor? Scowling, Loki says, “Come on, Hoenir’s heavy,” and starts walking again. This time she hurries to catch up.

“Did you have any plans?” Loki gasps out as they trudge along. “Since you have chosen to run rather than accept the suit of Baldur the Beautiful, Wise and Brave.”

“Is he those things?” Anganboða says.

Loki turns to her. Rain has plastered her raven locks to her face, and he realizes what he took for a cloak is actually just a blanket, probably stolen from her rooms in the palace. She is very desperate.

Turning her eyes to the muddy ground she says, “I look at him...and I see a golden prince, but when I turn away, from the corner of my eye I see something quite different. Something I don’t like, something dark. When I hear his words they sound sweet, but when I replay them in my mind they are cruel.” She laughs and there is something frantic in it. “Yet everyone says he is beautiful, wise and brave.”

Loki turns to her, mouth open. No one else has ever doubted Baldur. A knot in his stomach uncoils with a force so strong it hurts.

“I must be mad,” she says softly. “And yet...he bartered for my honor with my brother...am I worth so little that a man can do that and still be good?”

“No, my lady,” Loki says.

She turns to him and smiles softly, and he finds himself silently vowing that if Baldur ever lays a finger on her, ever hurts her, he will make him die a slow and painful death.

They turn round a hedge and step through the large trees that shield Hoenir’s hut from the rest of Asgard. “What a meager abode for Odin’s brother,” Anganboða says out of nowhere.

Loki blinks and shoves Hoenir against the door. “Hoenir is not Odin’s brother. Whatever made you think that?”

Hoenir grunts, the door gives way, and Mimir is overcome with a minor coughing fit.

Following him in the door, Anganboða says, “But the three of you...you’re brothers, surely...”

“We aren’t related,” says Loki.

Mimir’s minor coughing fit turns to a major coughing fit. Loki looks at him sharply, wondering what’s amiss. Mimir says nothing, just turns very red.

“
B
rothers
,” the wolf mutters nonsensically. “She was mad...but I still loved her. And Sigyn...” It whimpers again.

Amy looks down at Loki. Beside her, Beatrice kneels down, too. Surely losing your children, best friends and wife warranted a little sympathy? She touches the cloth gingerly to Loki’s chin, the reek suddenly not bothering her as much. Underneath his unshaven face she begins to see that nobility again.

“So sad,” says Beatrice with a sigh.

Loki’s eyes flutter open. “Where am I?” he asks, rolling onto his back.

Leaning over him, gently brushing his cheeks, Amy says, “You’re safe. You’re back with Beatrice and me.”

Loki’s eyes go over to Beatrice and then rove down Amy’s body. He mutters something. Even though it is in a strange foreign language, it sounds heavy with gratitude.

His eyes close again and Amy says to the wolf. “What did he just say?”

Blinking, the wolf says, “Oh, he said ‘By the World Tree you have nice tits.’” And then it pops out of existence.

Amy leans away, just a little bit horrified.

Beatrice shakes her head ruefully. “Well, he’s not the god of niceness.” Standing up she says, “I’m going to bed.”

T
he next morning
when Amy comes into the kitchen Beatrice is already there, and so is Loki. Beatrice is buzzing around the stove; Loki is sitting at the table, hunched over a cup of coffee and a half eaten plate of eggs. His hair is wet like he’s just come out of the shower, but he still hasn’t shaved. He isn’t in his armor. He’s wearing one of her grandfather’s old tee shirts and a pair of Grandpa’s utility pants that fit Loki like capris.

He doesn’t raise his eyes when she comes in, just stares at a point on the table next to the sugar jar.

“Hi,” Amy says.

Loki doesn’t move or speak. But Beatrice says, “Good morning, Dear.” And then her grandmother takes a cup of tea and goes and sits down next to Loki at the table.

Amy pours herself a cup of coffee and joins them.

Loki doesn’t do anything, just sits hunched over, as though inhabiting his own dark world. It’s frightening, and sad.

Swallowing, Amy says, “You told us what happened.”

Loki’s eyes shoot up to hers. For a moment Amy thinks they are completely black, but she blinks, and they’re that eerie light gray color again.

“You told us last night,” Amy says. Or his subconscious did. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to go into the whole wolf Fenrir thing. “I’m sorry about your family, and your friends.”

Loki looks away.

Beatrice shakily puts down her teacup. “I hope you won’t do anything ...rash...”

Amy blinks. A three-day bender seems pretty rash to her.

Loki’s eyes slide to Beatrice and then he smirks. “Are you are referring to Ragnarok, Beatrice?”

“It had crossed my mind.” Beatrice’s eyes are steady, but her hands are shaking on her teacup.

Amy’s heart stops. If she remembers Loki’s Wikipedia entry correctly, he’s the one who leads the dead in the battle against the Norse gods at Ragnarok, the end of the world.

Loki snorts, and then he begins to laugh quietly. Playing idly with his fork he says, “Oh, if only I could hop aboard the ship Naglfar and lead the armies of Hel against Asgard, I would, definitely. But there are no armies in the realm of Hel. Just my daughter’s corpse, and the corpses of her maids.” His smile drops and he looks away. “There is no Hel for the meek, no Valhalla for warriors slain in battle. Those are just dreams you humans use to console yourselves during your fleeting lives. There is just nothingness.”

“You don’t know that!” says Beatrice, fingering the cross hanging around her neck.

Loki looks up at her and glares. And then he stands from the table and walks out the door. Beatrice and Amy watch him walk into the garage. Amy looks around the kitchen. Nothing is on fire. For some reason that makes her sad.

S
itting
with her laptop and checkbook on the kitchen table, Amy’s looking at her bank accounts trying not to feel depressed. It’s the evening after Loki’s return. She had a temp job in the afternoon, and now she’s obsessively reconciling her checkbook, calculating how much she has earned and how much she’ll need to earn to have enough money to pay the school fees her scholarship doesn’t cover, and to make a down payment on a new place to live in the fall.

Hearing a knock at the door, Amy looks up. Through the window she sees Loki wearing the same clothes he had on earlier.

Grateful for the distraction and relieved that he looks sober and shaven, Amy walks over and opens the door. Face almost expressionless, Loki says, “Miss Lewis, it seems I will be a guest of your world for awhile. I was wondering if...” He looks away. “If you might help me get acclimated to your world’s current magic...technologies.”

Amy’s stares at him. That seems so healthy and proactive. “Wow. Good for you,” she says, too shocked to move from the doorway.

Shrugging, he says in a flat voice, “If I’m going to see Odin kneel before me while I hold his testicles in my hands as all of Asgard burns, I have to start somewhere.”

Amy’s mouth drops.

Straightening, Loki says, “I will make it worth your while somehow, I give you my — ”

Amy waves a hand. “No, no, no. It’s okay...of course I’ll help you if I can; you don’t owe me anything.” She’ll just take that Odin’s testicle thing and Asgard burning thing as a slight bit of hyperbole brought on by grief.

Loki tilts his head and his expression softens just a bit.

Her brow furrows. “Is there any place you’d like to start?”

Loki’s eyes go over to her laptop on the kitchen table. “Computers and the internets. The last time I was here I had some access to ENIAC — but things have come so far since then.”

Amy blinks at him. ENIAC? Shaking her head she steps aside and motions for him to come in. “Have a seat. I’ll get us something to drink.”

“Thank you,” says Loki, walking over and sitting in front of her computer. As she turns to the refrigerator, he’s staring at the blank screen of power save mode.

Taking out a pitcher of freshly made peach tea, she pours two glasses and turns around. Loki has one finger hovering above the keyboard and he’s staring at her bank account information.

“Whoa,” says Amy, going to the table and closing that tab.

Loki looks at her, brows slightly raised.

Wincing, Amy says, “You probably shouldn’t have seen that.”

Loki holds up two hands. “I just touched it and — ”

“No, no, no...It’s okay.” She grabs her checkbook and then brings the two glasses of tea over to the table. Handing him one, she takes a sip of her own. It’s not as cold as she expected. “Drats, I’ll have to get some ice,” she says.

Holding out a hand to her, Loki says, “Sit down and allow me.”

She hands him the glasses. He gives her a twisted half smile and frost climbs up the outside of both. “Here,” he says, handing one back.

Amy finds herself smiling...more than she should. Is she being flirty? She shouldn’t be flirty. He just lost his family and his best friends and that would be inappropriate. She schools her face to neutral. Is it her imagination or is her pulse a little quick? Just knowing about his family...he doesn’t seem so much like an obnoxious flirt anymore. He has children, he’s —

Loki clinks his glass with hers which snaps her back to the moment. She takes a sip. “It’s perfect,” she says, staring over her glass at him.

Loki raises an eyebrow. “Where should we start?”

Realizing she’s staring, she spins back to her computer. “Well, I guess, first...this is a mouse.” She toggles the wireless mouse she has next to her iMac. Remembering his confusion over Car, she says, “It’s just what it’s called...it’s not actually alive.”

Loki holds out a hand and she hands it to him. Eying the mouse he murmurs, “Hoenir would have fun with this.” Expression hardening, he says, “How does it work?”

Amy has some experience teaching techie neophytes. She expects hours of back and forth, and obvious questions that make her want to tear her hair out. That doesn’t happen.

Loki grasps the point and click concept immediately. They move quickly from mice to the internet, and he begins asking questions that are too technical. He accidentally calls up the browser’s options and gets a menu she has never seen. He clicks on something, and when the page of gobbledygook comes up, he recognizes it immediately as the code for the page.

That’s when she looks down and sees it. “Um...” she says. “Loki, your fingertips are blue...” It’s that lovely, robin’s egg shade she had seen before, and it almost seems to be alight from within.

He looks down and his brow furrows. He takes a breath and the color fades away, like a wave draining from sand. Turning to her, his expression sharp, he says, “It is just an illusion.”

Amy can’t help it; she puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay.”

Turning back to the computer he says dryly, “I blame you for putting the damned idea in my head.”

Removing her hand and taking a deep uncomfortable breath, Amy says, “Okay, maybe we should go next to Google. It’s an internet site that can tell you just about everything....”

Once Loki has access to Google, it quickly becomes apparent that Amy isn’t so much helping as holding Loki back. She gets up and lets him explore ‘How the Internet Works’ and ‘Static Versus Dynamic Web Pages’ by himself.

Beatrice comes in, they all eat dinner together, and then Loki is at the computer again. When Amy goes to bed, Loki is still there, the screen flashing from one page to another. His eyes look very dark, and she swears his skin has a blue cast but decides not to say anything.

The next day when Beatrice goes to fetch Loki for breakfast, Amy clicks on the browser’s history — just out of curiosity. She’s not sure what she expected to find, but she doesn’t expect to find a whole bunch of entries on something called Schrödinger’s cat, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, quantum computing, random number generators and something on financial derivatives. She backs slowly away.

At breakfast when she asks him what he was browsing the night before, he just smirks and says, “Magic.”

W
ith the help of Google
, Loki fixes the ceiling fan in her grandmother’s room — turns out the problem was actually in the fuse box. During his first week with them, among other acts of computer wizardry, Loki cleans up the hard drive on Beatrice’s PC — something Amy would have thought impossible since her grandmother seems to open every attachment and click on every link she’s ever gotten in an email. And he also manages to get a nasty virus off of nosy-neighbor Harry’s computer — Harry’s on Beatrice’s email list. Sometime that first week he also hooks up the television, the DVD player and the stereo so that all share one remote, something Amy never managed to do. After that Amy finds herself regularly watching TV with Loki late into the night. He lies on the couch, feet propped up on one end. She sits on the EZ-boy chair — she starts sleeping better there than anywhere else.

Overall, Beatrice and Amy are both really impressed by the way Loki immerses himself in modern technology and modern life. But there are some incidents.

A
my comes home just
after lunchtime during Loki’s second week with them. She had a job as a hostess at a local restaurant that morning. Beatrice meets her in the backyard, water pot in hand. “He’s in the kitchen,” Beatrice says. “I think you need to talk to him. We just don’t do that!”

Puzzled, Amy heads into the kitchen. Loki is wearing her grandmother’s apron...which is a little odd considering it is pink and far too small...but that isn’t what really grabs her attention.

“Why is there a dead pig on our kitchen table?” She’s been around enough dead animals in vet school to recognize it without most of its skin and to not be disgusted — even if she is mostly vegetarian.

Loki looks up from where he is leaning over said pig with a very big cleaver. His brows furrow. “It has come to my attention that I am, in Beatrice’s words, ‘Eating you out of house and home.’ I am trying to do my ‘fair share’.”

“By butchering a pig...”

“It is a free-range pig, much higher quality than you would get in the the grocery store. Also, it is freshly slaughtered. It will be delicious...even you will want to eat this bacon.” He smacks the pig’s hindquarters and smiles.

Tilting his chin and rubbing the back of his cheek with a bloody hand, he says, “Though tonight I think we should eat the head. I make a delicious sweetbread.” He looks at her, holding up the cleaver in a way that is kind of psycho-esque. “What?”

“You cook?” she says. That is probably the least important question in her mind, but somehow it pops up first.

He rolls his eyes. “Odin was always sending me out to babysit Thor when he went adventuring. Thor was a prince; a bastard, but a prince... I got to cook.”

Amy looks at the dead animal stretched out and filling the whole kitchen table. “Where did you get the pig?”

He blinks at her and then leans down and starts sliding the knife under the pig’s skin. “From a butcher on Fulton. I read about it on the internet and went this morning.”

“You don’t drive...did you take this thing on the bus?” She had taught him how to use the bus and left a pass out for him. The one time Amy tried to teach Loki how to drive, he turned the Subaru into a load bearing part of the garage wall. Amy doesn’t know how he can build her a personal website on ‘server space’ she didn’t know she had and hook it up to ‘RSS feeds’ on veterinary medicine but can’t manage to put a car in reverse. It probably relates somehow to him setting the toaster on fire, though.

He looks up at her. “You know they wouldn’t let me?” He shakes his head as though amazed. “I carried it back. I got a lot of stares. You’d think people never had seen a hog before.”

Amy can hear the neighborhood gossip mill grinding in her head. Trying not to think about it she says, “How did you pay for it?”

He blinks again.

Oh, no. “Did you steal this pig?”

“I have no money. Of course I stole the pig,” he says.

“We don’t do that!” says Amy.

He stares at her. Then frowning and crossing his arms, cleaver still in hand, he says, “Do you want me to return it?”

Amy looks at the partially butchered animal and rubs her eyes. “No, just tell me where you stole it from and give me your oath that you won’t do it again.” She tells herself she’ll send the butcher compensation. Somehow. Anonymously.

“Fine...you have my oath, while I reside at your house, I will not steal another pig — ”

“Anything,” says Amy.

He glowers at her.

She glowers right back even though she feels a pang of fear. “It could attract attention and the police.”

Narrowing his eyes, he uncrosses his arms and rolls his eyes. “Fine, you have my oath I will not steal while I reside under your roof.”

Amy decides that is the best she is going to do. Later that night, despite her better judgment, she tries some pig cheek — it just smells so good. It is delicious.

I
t is
near the end of the second week when the second incident occurs. Amy is just coming home late from her hostessing job. There is a light in the living room. She follows it and finds Loki kneeling in front of the TV cabinet fiddling with the remote.