by Mackenzi Lee
“It’s nothing personal,” Loki replied. “But this simply isn’t the best use of my time.”
“Well.” Theo swiveled forward on his stool. “I’m sorry we’re not as interesting as the stolen artifacts your brother is hunting down.”
“You’re not half as interesting,” Loki replied. “The corpses aren’t not interesting, I will admit, but they just can’t compare.”
“Did you ask her about them?” Theo asked. “The corpses?”
Loki felt his heart begin to pound, but he kept his face resolutely the same. “She doesn’t have any magic left. She was banished here by my father years ago, and all her power has deteriorated.”
“What does that have to do with it?” Theo asked.
“Because they died by magic, according to your spectacles,” Loki replied. He was starting to feel hot and itchy, and suddenly wanted a drink, even if it was foul. “So she couldn’t have killed them.”
“What about magical artifacts?” Theo asked. “Maybe she’s got some secret murder weapon?”
“As opposed to what other kind of weapon?” Loki muttered, but Theo ignored him.
“Maybe she’s got your Norn Stones and is using them to kill people.”
“She doesn’t have the Norn Stones,” Loki replied. “They were stolen long after she was banished. And they don’t work like that—they’re not powerful on their own. They amplify the power their wielder already has, and Odin’s sorceress would’ve detected that amplification. Even if she didn’t care about getting caught, using them to wipe out Midgardians would be ridiculous. Why waste strength on something that can be done just as easily with a knife in the dark?”
Theo’s eyes darted sideways to him. He truly had an unbelievable number of freckles. Loki had never seen anything like it. It might have looked garish on another man, but somehow it just made Theo’s face more interesting. A starry sky that could be studied for years and still there would be constellations left unnamed. “I was going to invite you to come stay at my place tonight, but if you’re thinking of knives in the dark, I may reconsider.”
Loki blinked. “You...you want me to stay with you?”
“As a houseguest,” Theo said quickly, the skin beneath those freckles reddening. “I thought you might need somewhere to stay, since we were out all last night. Mrs. S. said you could fend for yourself until you started being a bit less belligerent, but...I’ve got room. Not much. It’s a pretty rubbish flat, but there’s a roof. And a bit of floor you can kip up on.”
“I can’t have the bed?” Loki asked with mock affront. “I am a prince of Asgard, you know.”
Theo looked momentarily concerned, like he had actually started some kind of interdimensional scandal by not offering him a bed, but then Loki raised one eyebrow, and Theo shook his head with a weary laugh. “It’ll do you good to sleep on the cold hard ground for one night, Your Highness.”
Theo’s building was, as advertised, rubbish. The night was chilly, but somehow it was even colder inside. The wallpaper in the hallway had begun to decay, revealing soft plaster molding and support beams beneath that looked like they were doing little to provide support. The flat was on the third floor, and Theo had to stop outside of his door, breathing heavily and stretching out his bad leg.
“You raised my expectations far too high,” Loki said, lifting his foot as a large insect skittered down the hallway and into a large crack in the wall.
“Well, prepare to be impressed.” Theo fiddled in his pocket for the key, then jammed it in the lock. It took him throwing what seemed like the entirety of his fairly insubstantial weight into it before it creaked open. “See?” he said as he strode in, Loki on his heels. “Fit for a king.”
It seemed hardly fit for any kind of living thing. Loki wouldn’t even keep the Southwark corpses here. The floor was uncarpeted wood, splintered and creaking underfoot. There was a pile of blankets bundled onto a limp mattress on the floor, and a small grate for a fire with a single set of cutlery and a tin plate and mug stacked beside it. There was a chipped washbasin below a glassless window, its frame lined with oiled paper that was starting to tear around the nails. The room was made even smaller by the fact that two walls were stacked to the bottom of the window frame with mismatched books.
“You know,” Loki said, toeing a volume that had tumbled from the pile. “You’d have more room if you kept fewer books.”
Theo hung his cane on the edge of the grate beside the small fireplace and began to stoke the ashes. “I’d rather have books than space.”
“Well, when the floor caves in, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He watched Theo struggling with the fire for a moment, then offered, “Do you want me to do that?”
“No, no,” Theo said quickly. “Let me do something hostly. Though this is not the place to host anyone.” Silence fell over the flat as Loki watched Theo blow gently on the cinders until they blushed back to life. He suddenly felt very aware of both of them in this small room, barely able to be more than a few feet apart from each other even standing in opposite corners. He glanced around, looking for something to stare at that wasn’t Theo, but there was so little else. It was too dark to see the titles of the books, and the rotting floorboards were hardly encouraging to look at. And he kept finding his eyes wandering to Theo, the curl of his shoulders, the concavity of his cheeks as he stoked the fire, the way he swiped his hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist.
Why are you looking at him? said a small voice inside him; it sounded like Amora’s.
Loki turned away.
Theo pushed himself up with a hand on the grate, then brushed his hands off on his trousers. They looked at each other, and Loki was suddenly sure Theo knew how intently he had been watching him. Then Theo smiled sheepishly and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Do you want some tea?” he said. “Or food. Or a change of clothes? I don’t think we’re the same...” He held up one hand, like he was comparing their heights, then let it drop. “Though I suppose you can do something about that, can’t you? With your spells and things. If you really want—”
“I don’t need anything,” Loki interrupted. Theo nodded, tucking his chin to his chest. Then, after a few moments of silence, Loki added, “Thank you.”
Theo nodded, teeth pressed into his bottom lip. “Suit yourself.” He looked around, and Loki thought about offering to leave just to relieve them both of the awkwardness, but then Theo said, “I think I’ll make some tea. For me. If you don’t mind. I mean, you can have some as well, but...Tea.”
He limped back to the stove, taking a kettle off the hook beside it. The firelight glanced off a pair of the green-lensed spectacles on the mantelpiece, abandoned after their time at the crime scene.
“Why do you do this?” Loki asked.
Theo glanced up from the kettle. “Do what?”
“Work for Mrs. S. and her Society. Or work for my father, I suppose. Why not do real work? Something that pays, so you...”
“Mrs. S. pays me,” Theo protested. When Loki raised an eyebrow, he conceded, “A bit. She pays for the flat, anyway.”
“Yes, but with a real profession, you could get a flat that wasn’t condemned.”
“I haven’t got many options for employment.”
“Because you’re a criminal,” Loki said.
The kettle lid slipped from Theo’s fingers, clattering to the floor. He looked up. “So you know it all, then.”
Loki wondered suddenly if he’d made a mistake in saying it. He briefly considered leaving again. Instead he turned away and picked up the first book on top of one of the piles, flipping through it. “Mrs. S. mentioned something. After the police—”
“Bloody Scotland Yard.” Theo hung the kettle over the fire and pushed it into place. It bounced against the back of the fireplace with a clang of metal on brick. “Those pricks never miss a chance. Do you want to know all the sordid details, then? I can assure you it’s a very thrilling story of unrequited pining and misreading signs and me making a com
plete ass of myself and then getting arrested for it. Ripped from the pages of a penny dreadful.”
“I don’t understand.”
Theo mashed a hand over the back of his neck. “I kissed someone I thought was interested in me. He wasn’t. I got rounded up as part of a factory raid, and this bloke was angry so he went to the police, and when they let everyone else go, they kept me for indecency.”
“I understand the mechanics of it,” Loki said. “What I meant is that I don’t understand why you Midgardians are so small-minded.”
Theo looked up. “What do you mean?”
“On Asgard, we don’t have such a limited view of sex. Or love, for that matter. There are no rules about who can be with whom. Certainly no one is arrested for it.”
Theo stared at him. In the pale glow of the fire, he looked as though he had caught a glimpse of something rare and precious, a wildflower opening its petals between a parted jungle curtain. “Do you mean that?”
There was nothing Loki could say in the face of such backward justice. Why waste a cell—why waste your time—trying to punish someone for something that wasn’t a crime?
Theo looked away first, turning back to the teakettle. The firelight pocked and hollowed his face. “Do you have a preference? Between men and women?”
“I feel equally comfortable as either.”
“No, I don’t mean...not all of us can change our gender at will.”
“I don’t change my gender. I exist as both.”
“You’re not...That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does to me.”
“Well, all hail Asgard, then.”
Theo leaned backward, fingers pressed to his mouth and his eyes on the fire again. “You wouldn’t take me back, would you?” he asked after a moment. “To Asgard?”
“In what capacity?” Loki asked.
“Dunno.” Theo shrugged. “Kept man?” He laughed at his own joke, then said, “Never mind. God, this is all so strange.”
“What is?” Loki asked.
“That I’m talking about Asgard with Loki, the brother of Thor—”
“Please,” Loki interrupted. “Call me anything but the brother of Thor.”
“—God of Mischief, and he’s telling me that there’s a place in this universe where no one gives a fig about whom you fall in love with, and that is the thing I find most unbelievable of all of it.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, then hooked the arm holding the kettle over the fire with the poker, pulling it out of the flames. “Are you certain you don’t want any tea? I promise it’s not as rancid as the gin Mrs. S. gave you.”
“All right.” Loki watched as Theo added leaves to two small strainers balanced over chipped mugs and poured the hot water over them, the steam wafting from the surface in lazy tendrils. He handed a cup to Loki and they lingered for a time in silence, Theo perched on a stack of books, Loki leaning against the wall, both with their lips pressed to the rims of their cups, waiting for the tea to cool enough to drink.
“Is this what humans do?” Loki asked. “Go to museums and clubs and drink tea and sleep on moldy mattresses in freezing flats.”
“Sometimes,” Theo replied. “When we’re not fighting and working and dying in factories. What do Asgardians do?”
“The same,” Loki replied. “Though we don’t have factories. We die on battlefields, more often.”
“We do that too. Sometimes.” Theo took a tentative sip of his tea, his eyes flicking to Loki over the rim. “Do you die, in Asgard? I mean, not you personally. But...do people die? Are you people? What should I call you? Asgardians?”
“We die,” Loki said. “Asgardians die. Not so easily as you humans do, though. Our lives are much longer.”
“How much longer?”
“Several thousand years, give or take a millennium.”
Theo spat a mouthful of tea back into his cup. “You do not. You’re having me on.”
“I’m not. Really!” He laughed when Theo still looked skeptical. “An Asgardian can live longer than humans can understand. Though perhaps it helps that we don’t daily breathe air that is actively poisoning us.”
“How dare you speak ill of London,” Theo said in mock outrage. “She has her charms.”
“I have yet to see them. Though I hear the dogs are good.”
Theo paused, his teacup to his lips. “So are you at the prime of your life, then? For an Asgardian.”
“I’m only just beginning.” Loki took a sip of the tea. It was still hot, and he tasted the heat more than the tea itself, but the steam smelled spicy and bitter, and left a damp film across his cheeks. “You wouldn’t be happy in Asgard.”
Theo shrugged. “Got to be better than here.”
“You’d be lonely if you were the only human.”
“You’d have to keep me company, then.”
“I’m very busy.”
“I don’t mind.” Theo took a sip of his tea, then said suddenly, “It’s just really nice.”
“What is?”
“It’s nice...” Theo repeated, his thumb skimming the rim of his teacup. “To know that there’s somewhere out there in the cosmos where people like me don’t have to be afraid.”
Loki woke to the sound of gentle rain on the window-
sill.
He had fallen asleep on the floor beside Theo’s filthy mattress, but sometime in the night he must have shifted, for now they were both lying on it, burrowed like rabbits under their respective blankets. Theo was still asleep, his hands pulled up to his face and his mouth slightly open. Loki rose as quietly as he could, pausing only to help himself to the black umbrella leaning against the door. No point wasting the energy for a spell. Or raising the questions that might come with being the only one unaffected by rain on a busy city street. Theo would likely know where he’d gone, or at least guess. Perhaps he’d tell Mrs. S., or simply follow Loki himself. What did it matter? Though the SHARP Society did not have his father’s most attentive ear, Loki was certain that if Mrs. S. delivered a report of his fraternizing with Amora, he would be sucked back up the Bifrost and locked inside the palace before he could so much as breathe the same air as her again.
The walk to the Inferno Club wasn’t long, but the air was bitter with the frigid rain, and Loki found his nerves mounting as he drew nearer. Why was he nervous? It was Amora. His friend. They knew each other. Perhaps that was exactly the problem. He looked down at himself, still in his all-black ensemble from the night before, and considered changing the color of his tie to emerald to match the green veins in her eyes. But if she noticed, he’d likely die of embarrassment, and if she didn’t notice, he’d die of disappointment. Either way, dead. Not ideal.
He wasn’t sure Amora would even be at the club, or that he’d be able to get in, but he sent a note to her dressing room with one of the men sweeping up the tunnel, and a few minutes later he returned to tell Loki the Enchantress wanted to see him onstage. In the overcast dawn light, the club interior looked silly and garish. The tabletops were smeared with the sticky remains of last night’s spilled drinks, the floor littered with oyster and peanut shells crushed underfoot. The plaster demons had cracks, and chunks were missing from their bodies. Loki recognized the man sitting on the bar reading a newspaper as the ticket taker from the night before, looking strange and out of place with his shirtsleeves rolled up and a kerchief around his neck. The headline on the front page read in block letters LIVING DEAD KILLER STALKS SOUTHWARK; ANOTHER RIPPER?
He didn’t glance up as Loki crossed the empty barroom and passed through the curtains leading to the stage. The theatre was as dark as it had been the night before, but the gaslights were glowing, casting slender beams that traced Amora’s silhouette against the backdrop. She had pushed the chairs back from the table with the talking board and was on her knees, one arm craned to adjust something underneath.
When she saw him, she stopped and stood, her shadow falling long and dark behind her. “Loki. You came back.”
&nbs
p; He stepped onto the stage, into the same column of light illuminating her. It felt like a small universe the two of them shared. This close, and in the harsh lights of the stage rather than the dreamy firelight of her dressing room, her face looked softer than he remembered it. Amora was never the sort to let her guard down, let the gaps between her plates of armor show. Maybe she thought the darkness covered her. Maybe she didn’t care if Loki saw her like this. Maybe she had a reason for showing her softness.
He didn’t know what to say, so instead, he pointed to the table. “Can I help? With...whatever you’re doing.”
“Rigging a new trick.”
“You mean you don’t use actual magic to contact actual spirits?”
She rolled her eyes. “What a waste of my precious life. Come here, I’ll show you.” She pulled a couple of the chairs up to the table, and he sat in one obediently. “Now,” she said, sitting down in the other. “Pretend there’s someone you want to contact. Someone who has died and you’re desperate to tell them one last thing.”
“All right.”
She reached under the table and withdrew a bell on a stand. She placed it in the center, over the painted alphabet. “Sometimes I like to do a bit of theatrics—going into a trance and spiritual tremors and all that.” She did a halfhearted demonstration, and he laughed. “That proves your spirit is here.”
“There were no such theatrics last night.”
“Yes, well. I was too distracted for a proper trance.” Her eyes flicked downward, mouth curling in a small smile. “So we call to the spirit of whomever it is you’re wanting to talk to, and I see if they’re here.” She rapped her knuckles on the table, then looked around the room as though searching for a face in the dark crowd, her arms raised. “Spirit, if you are here, make yourself known!”
A pause. The silence of the theatre suddenly felt vast. In the club above them, Loki heard the tinkle of a glass breaking.
Then the bell on the table rang once. Twice. Three times.
