Very Much Alive (4 page)

Logan, on the other hand, was more difficult to ignore. He reached forward and rubbed the back of her neck, the touch warm and surprisingly soothing. “Ease up, Jordan. I know it’s a lot to take in, but we’re willing to answer any questions you have.”

“And we’re ordering in pizza.” Kir’s cheerful announcement fell flat as Logan and Jordan stared at him. “What? I’m just saying.”

Jordan stared at Logan’s reflection in the rearview mirror and quirked her eyebrows. Kir had been determinedly cheerful the entire twenty minute drive from her office to their condo. “He has a great future at Hallmark, doesn’t he?”

Logan choked, hiding his laugh behind the back of his hand. Kir, on the other hand, reached out and gently bopped her on the back of the head. “Very funny. Ha ha.” He pointed towards the backseat. “And you, stop encouraging her.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Logan did another one of his bows. His laughing gaze tangled with Kir’s in the mirror before they both looked away with identical grins.

Jordan watched the exchange with a puzzled frown. She could have sworn both men had been looking at her in her office with something other than professional interest. However, having a brother who was gay, she’d learned to recognize the signs of two men who were a couple. And from the looks of things, Kir and Logan were definitely a couple.

She saw Logan staring at her again in the rearview mirror, confusing her even further. He was looking at her like she was a Godiva chocolate and he was starving for a taste.
What the hell?

Then she thought about all of the myths about Loki, and Loki’s sexuality. If the myths were true, Loki was firmly bisexual.
Trisexual? Omnisexual? The man is a
mom
, for God’s sake! Do they even
have
a word for Loki’s sexuality?
From the quirky grin that briefly passed over his face he knew exactly what she was thinking about, too. She faced forward again, her cheeks heating in embarrassment. Pictures of the two men wrapped in each other’s arms danced through her head. She firmly squashed them, not wanting to deal with the consequences of her fantasies. She didn’t exactly carry around spare panties, for God’s sake.

Jordan didn’t do “casual sex”. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing
casual
about it. Unless her emotions were engaged, her body wasn’t. Although, from the feel of Logan’s fingers still stroking her neck, her body was more than willing to drag her emotions along for the ride.
Oh, and what a ride it would be
, her traitorous body whispered.

Kir pulled into their condo’s parking garage and pulled into the space assigned to them. He started to get out of the car and was stopped by Logan’s grip on his shoulder.

“No, Kir.” Logan got out of the car with a grunt and took a look around the garage.

Kir rolled his eyes. “Sit, Kir. Stay, Kir. Good dog. Woof.”

“What’s he doing?” Jordan watched as Logan scoped out the place, his movements sleek and sure. She bet he didn’t make a single sound as he moved. He looked right and left, leaning behind a pillar to check out the lower level. His jeans tightened across his damn fine ass. Her body knelt and pled at the feet of her emotions,
Please? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?

“Making sure there are no assassins waiting for us.”

Jordan blinked and focused back on Kir.
My God, that much gorgeous should come with a warning label.
“Assassins?”

Kir nodded as he watched Logan move around the parking lot. “Grimm wants me dead in the worst way. He has an assassin named Val—”

“Oh no. Uncle Val?” Talk about a libido killer. Uncle Val
looked
scary as hell, but he’d always been affectionate towards her and the twins.

Kir glanced at her but quickly turned his attention back to a rapidly approaching Logan. “
Uncle
Val?”

“Brown hair, blue eyes, mean-looking son of a bitch?”

“That would be Val.”

“Yup. Uncle Val.”

“Uncle Val is Vali, the man who murdered my brother.”

Jordan stared out the front windshield and searched her memory of Norse mythology, trying to match up the man who’d tossed her in the air as a child with the man Kir was describing. “Um. Vali?”

Kir sighed as Logan motioned for them to leave the car. “Wait until we get upstairs, okay?”

“Okay, what?” Logan asked as he held open Jordan’s door.

“Okay, you guys are going to explain to me who Vali is once we get upstairs.”

“Oh.” Logan shook his head as he led them to the elevator. “Listen closely, because I hate talking like this and I’m not repeating it.” He took a deep breath as they entered the elevator, and Jordan paused to admire how wide his chest was. And then, as the elevator began its rise to the twenty-second floor, he crossed his arms over that chest and began to chant.

“I saw for Baldur—

for the bloodstained sacrifice,

Odin’s child—

the fates set hidden.

There stood full-grown,

higher than the plains,

slender and most fair,

the mistletoe.

“There formed from that stem

which was slender-seeming,

a shaft of anguish, perilous:

Hodr started shooting.

A brother of Baldur

was born quickly:

he started—Odin’s son—

slaying, at one night old.

“He never washed hands,

never combed head,

till he bore to the pyre

Baldur’s adversary—

while Frigg wept

in Fen Halls

for Valhall's woe.

Do you still seek to know? And what?”

Kir leaned back as Logan’s deep voice washed over him. There were times he missed the cadence of the poetry of his homeland, but this particular piece was one of his least favorites. It described how, at one day old, Vali slew Hodr in retaliation for the death of Baldur. That Hodr was both blind and was meant to help Baldur rule Valhalla had factored in greatly when Grimm was making his plans to murder them both.

Jordan leaned back against the wall. “What was that?”

“It’s a portion of the Poetic Edda, translated by Ursula Dronke.” Logan was staring at her, his expression carefully nonchalant.

“Oh. Well. That clears
that
up.” From the confused frown on her face, it had raised more questions than it answered.

The doors opened onto a hallway. Kir stepped out, pulling out his key card. Jordan stepped out next. Logan pushed passed her and Kir, taking Kir’s key card to open the door to their condo. Since they’d come to Philadelphia Logan had been a nervous wreck, worried sick that Val and Grimm would find them before they would have a chance to set their plans in motion.

He entered the posh condo, his sneakers making no sound on the shiny maple flooring. Kir sighed as Logan nodded, letting him know no one had disrupted the wards Logan had set before heading out that morning.

Without missing a beat Jordan sat on the modern, snow white chaise. “Okay, I have to admit, the knife thing wasn’t nearly as impressive as flaming Logan.” She grinned, letting them know she was completely aware of the double entendre.

“Very funny.” Logan flopped down next to her, one knee resting on the white chaise, his elbow resting along the back and his hand propping up his head as he faced her.

Kir took a seat on the ottoman that doubled as a coffee table and picked up the explanation they’d begun in the elevator. “So Vali, at one day old, killed my brother.”

“Precocious little tyke.”

“Yeah, he was a total Gerber baby.” Logan sneered.

“Why didn’t Hodr just, I don’t know, stop him?”

“Because, unlike a normal baby, Vali grew to manhood in the space of a few hours. He couldn’t stop Vali from killing him.”

“He couldn’t see where Vali was, couldn’t fight him, and felt that his death was completely justified.” Kir heard the old pain in Logan’s voice; Hodr hadn’t meant anything to him at the time, but Baldur’s grief over his dead brother and anger at his traitorous father had been the first stepping stone in the beginning of their relationship. For the first time, he’d seen Logan as someone other than an angry, annoying young god, and Logan had seen Kir as more than the pretty, admired, social butterfly.

“Can I ask you a quick question that’s been bothering me?”

Kir nodded. “Of course.”

“Should I call you guys Baldur and Loki?”

“No!”

“Uh-uh.”

They looked at each other and grimaced. They’d both replied at the same time and the same volume.

“We’d prefer to be called by the names we’ve chosen rather than the names that were chosen for us.” Kir turned his attention back to a confused looking Jordan. “We’re no longer those people.”

Her gaze intensified as she worked out what he meant. “You mean you’re not a god of spring and he’s not a fire giant?”

“I’m not a naive, trusting fool and he’s not a hormonal teenager. Ow.” Kir rubbed the spot on his thigh Logan smacked.

“Hormonal teenager?”

“You fucked anything that would let you, and I mean
anything
, and you emo’d all over the place.” He looked at Jordan and grinned. “His growing pains were
horrendous
.”

“I did
not
‘emo’!”

Kir laughed at the outrage in Logan’s voice. He’d curled his fingers up, making quotation marks.

“Oh, really? How about the dinner party where you got drunk and told everyone off, including letting some of the gods know that their darling, chaste wives were off playing in the clover while their husbands were at war, hmm?”

Logan snorted. “Those idiots weren’t off making war, they were rolling around in their own clover.”

Jordan’s bemused voice interrupted them. “Did you know, with the nose ring, every time you snort I think of a bull?”

Kir had to bury his face in the ottoman, but couldn’t do anything about his shaking shoulders, or the muffled sounds of his laughter.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jordan put her hands on her hips. “Okay. If you two are done playing, can you actually explain to me how this all went down?”

Logan watched as Jordan stood and began pacing in front of the floor to ceiling windows that looked out over Rittenhouse Square. He ignored the still muffled sounds of Kir’s laughter. It was both annoying and endearing that, once his lover got going, getting him to stop was damn near impossible. He had to work it out of his system in his own time. Unfortunately, that left Logan to explain everything to Jordan.

“I was watching Odin fairly closely at the time, for some reason or another. I think I was planning on playing a prank on Frigg and wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to get in my way. I saw him leave early one morning and something about the way he left, his face, maybe his body language, let me know he was up to no good.”

“You followed him?”

“Of course. I had to know what would make him look like that, like the cat that got the cream. I figured this was much better than playing a silly trick on Frigg.” Jordan also ignored Kir as he sat up and wiped the laughter tears away. “I saw Odin shift shape into me and pick a sprig of mistletoe in full view of a farmer. I made sure he didn’t see me as he took off again, heading back home.

“I knew mistletoe was Baldur’s only vulnerability, so I was curious as to why his father would be picking some, especially since he’d taken my form to do it.” His smile was sour. “Not exactly confidence inducing. Anyway, I followed Odin and watched him. He crafted the sprig of mistletoe into an arrowhead and made an arrow meant to kill his own son.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

He stared at her. “You’re kidding, right? Who would have believed me?”

“I didn’t believe him.” Kir sighed. “My own father, out to kill me? It was unbelievable.”

“So I managed to subdue Baldur, tied him up, and put him in a safe place where he could watch what happened and no one would know. Then I took his shape and his place.”

“How did you keep from getting injured by the things they fired at you?”

“He didn’t.”

Damn. Kir
still
hasn’t gotten over that?
The anguish in Kir’s voice was noticeable to anyone who knew him. Without thought he rubbed his lover’s knee, soothing him, not surprised when Kir picked his hand up, squeezed it, and let it go.

He turned his attention back to Jordan. “I took it, and let them think it didn’t hurt.”

“But… I thought the Norse gods could die?”

“We can, but on the way I’d had a little chat with my daughter. She agreed that, for that short amount of time, no amount of damage, not even an instantly fatal wound, would kill me.”

“Your daughter?”

He looked her straight in the eyes. “I had three children outside my marriage, remember?”

She gulped. “Hel.”

He nodded. “So I stood there, and managed to keep them all from seeing my bleeding using a spell an old Jotun witch had taught me. Odin shifted into me and strode onto the field.”

“That’s when I knew Logan was telling the truth.”

He let the silence linger for a moment after Kir’s soft announcement before continuing. The agony of that day, the barbs and arrows piercing his flesh while he smiled and laughed it off, still had the power to awaken him with nightmares not even Kir could soothe. “So Odin, as me, stood behind Hodr, handed his blind son the arrow meant to kill his heir, and shot me instead, right through the heart. He then took off, making sure to shift back into himself out of sight of the others so he could properly express his outrage.” He smiled cynically. “To celebrate, he immediately rushed off and fucked his mistress, begetting Vali in the process, who slew Hodr, etc., etc.”

Kir grimaced. “I watched as Loki was borne off, his body anointed for burial. As soon as he could he left a simulacrum in his place and released me, but he collapsed before he could do anything more. He was so wounded, pierced so many times that I thought, despite his daughter’s promises, he would die.”

“So Baldur took it upon himself to go to Hel and explain what had happened, never knowing that Frigg had sent a messenger asking her to release him back into the world.”