by Mackenzi Lee
Gem scratched his head. “I don’t think I’m supposed to—”
“Just do it,” Loki said, then stalked off into the night. As soon the theatre door had shut behind him, he broke into a run, not sure where he was going but certain what he was looking for. Somewhere dark, somewhere out of sight, somewhere hidden and secluded. This city was made up of crevices and shadows. There were so many choices.
But he found her down an empty street lined with brick tenement houses, their chimneys belching smoke. She had someone else with her, someone pressed up against one of the walls. Amora held their mouths close together and breathed deeply, like she was inhaling incense. Loki swore he saw a shimmer in the air like he had through Theo’s green-lensed glasses, saw the soul pass from one to the other.
“Amora!” he called.
Amora stepped backward in surprise, and Rachel Bowman’s body collapsed onto the cobbled street at her feet, her limbs puddled like an unstrung marionette. Living dead.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said as he approached her.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, seizing her by the wrist. He was shaking, furious she had gone back on her word and risked compromising all the work they’d done.
In contrast, Amora looked startlingly calm. “You were right,” she said, nudging Rachel’s body with the toe of her boot. “She was no one.”
“Come away from her.” Loki tried to drag her back from Rachel’s body, but Amora held her ground. She seemed to be savoring the scene, breathing deeply through her nose with her head tipped back to the sky. “Amora,” he snapped, and when she didn’t reply, he grabbed her by the shoulders, spinning her to face him. “You think this won’t betray us? The SHARP Society has spent weeks thinking it’s a murderer, and then as soon as we start to convince them otherwise, you go and suck dry the only person in that theatre who made an ass of you.”
“She made an ass of herself,” Amora murmured.
“It doesn’t matter!” He wanted to scream at her, to shake her until she understood. How could she not understand what she’d done? How could her word to him have meant so little? “You’ve given it away.”
Amora crossed her arms. “You’re being hysterical.”
“I am not being hysterical,” Loki snapped. “You’re being reckless and stupid. You want out of this realm? Because you won’t get out of here if you keep doing this.”
“Do you?” she challenged, her voice savage. “Or are you having too much fun luxuriating here with your human friends?”
He turned from her, his hands balling into fists at his sides, and returned to where Rachel was lying. “We have to cover this up. Help me carry her to the water. We’ll throw her in the Thames. When she washes up it may look like she drowned.”
“Whatever you say, Your Majesty,” she said, but she didn’t move. She stayed in the shadows, watching him hoist Rachel’s body into his arms, with her arms folded.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m just not certain who it is you’re loyal to,” she replied coolly. “And I’d rather not take my chances.”
“You.” He let Rachel’s body slip back to the cobblestones as he straightened to face her. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m covering up your mistake. This was all for you.”
She didn’t say anything. Loki bent down and seized Rachel Bowman’s body again, this time hefting her arm over his shoulder. “Help me.”
He thought for a moment she’d refuse, but then she grabbed the other side and they pulled up Rachel between them. The path to the water was steep and slick, but almost empty. The few people they passed hardly glanced at them. The neighborhood was thick with bars, and it was not a strange sight to see two friends carrying a drunken third home over their shoulders.
Together, they carried Rachel Bowman down to the banks and dropped her body into the black water of the Thames. As the gentle current carried her away, Amora turned and stalked back up the path toward the club.
“If this is how you want it to be,” Loki called to her, “I’m done. I won’t help you anymore.”
She waved to him over her shoulder, wiggling her fingers. “You’ll come back to me.”
“I’m done, Amora.”
She spun on her heel and blew him a kiss. “Check those books. You’ve got so much still to learn, Trickster.”
Loki turned away as she disappeared. He stayed on the banks, watching Rachel’s body float farther and farther away until it was out of sight, another thing dumped into the water in the hopes it would be forgotten.
When Mrs. Sharp burst into the Society office three mornings later waving a newspaper, Loki felt his blood run cold, certain Rachel Bowman’s body had been found and his plan exposed. He hadn’t spoken to Amora since they had parted on the banks of the Thames. He didn’t know how many more bodies she had left littering the London streets, or if she’d kept herself locked in her dressing room, starving herself of magic, or something in between, though she had always been one to go to extremes.
Either way, he was expecting to see her handiwork in the headlines.
But instead, in bold letters across the top of the newspaper Mrs. S. dropped on the table where he, Gem, and Theo were eating breakfast: AUTOPSY ORDERED ON LIVING DEAD; CAUSE UNDETERMINED, BUT DEATH CONFIRMED.
“They’re dead!” Mrs. S. said, clapping her hands together in a merry bout of delight that didn’t at all fit the morbidity of the statement. “Žydr·e Matulis and her husband let them autopsy their darling girl, and the living dead have been confirmed as actual official corpses. They’ll be taken from London to Brookwood on Sunday on the Necropolis Rail.”
Theo picked up the paper, his eyes scanning the article. “It worked.”
“It did indeed.” Mrs. S. wrapped her arms around Loki’s neck from behind. “I apologize for putting you in that box and keeping you magicless when we first met—did I ever tell you that? Oh God, this is such fantastic news. We’re celebrating. I’m going out for Chelsea buns. Do you want one? I’ll get a box—you might think you don’t, but you will once you smell them.”
Loki sat in silence for a moment after she left. Theo was still reading the paper. “Did you know about this?” he asked suddenly, turning the page to face Loki. A small piece, overshadowed in the corner by the lead story, was about Rachel Bowman’s body being dragged from the Thames.
“No,” Loki replied. “Why would I know about it?”
“She’s the woman who was at the show,” he said. “We saw her at the morgue. I thought she introduced herself to you.”
“She must have been drunk, interrupting the show like that,” Loki said. “Then she tipped into the Thames on her way home and drowned.”
“Perhaps.” Theo turned the paper back to himself, fiddling with the corner. “You were with the Enchantress that night, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Loki said. “In her dressing room. Weren’t we, Gem?”
Gem looked up from his food, then between them. “He came to see her,” he said to Theo, and Loki was impressed by what a careful sidestep of a statement it was. Not a truth, not a lie. He didn’t think Gem had it in him.
It took three tries to catch the attention of someone in Asgard through the magical connection to the arena’s washbasins. It was a servant boy, who was more than a bit alarmed by the talking washbasin, and was still bug-eyed when Loki sent him off to fetch Thor.
“Welcome back,” he said as he saw Thor’s silhouette approaching. His brother’s face dipped over the basin, long strands of hair tumbling over his shoulders and rippling the surface of the water. The disruption was reflected on Loki’s end. “Did you find the Norn Stones?”
“Not yet,” Thor replied, a raw note of frustration cracking his voice. “How goes the work on Midgard?”
“I think I’ve achieved what I set out to do here.”
“That’s brilliant. I’ll tell father. He’s just returned home.”
“Don’t—not yet. I have—”
Behind him, he heard t
he flump of the curtains and turned as Theo stuck his head through. “I’m going out and thought you might—Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?”
“I’m speaking to my brother.”
“Are you really?” Theo’s cheeks went pink. “Your brother, Thor?”
“That’s the one.”
“Tell him I said hello.”
“I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.” He turned back to his brother’s reflection in the water basin. “Theo says hello.”
Thor frowned. “Who?”
Loki glanced over his shoulder at Theo. “He says hello back and that I’m both the better looking and more talented of the pair of us, all hail Asgard.”
From the door, Theo gave him a salute as Thor cried, “I did not say that! Loki, tell this Theo I did not say that.”
Loki heard the bell jangle in the shop. “What a shame, he just left.”
“Who is he?”
“Someone I’ve been working with here. A Midgardian.”
Thor’s face broke into a wide and maddeningly sincere smile. “You’ve made friends.”
“I have not,” Loki replied crossly.
“I didn’t mean it as an insult,” Thor replied, then added, “Most people wouldn’t have taken it as such.”
“You learn to tolerate people when you spend so much time in proximity to them. That’s what growing up with you taught me.”
“Why are you getting defensive?”
“Because I haven’t grown...I haven’t made friends.” He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it off his face. Behind Thor’s head, shadows passed on the ceiling, and a voice that sounded like Sif’s called for him to follow.
“Just a moment!” Thor called, then turned back to Loki. “What is it you’ve summoned me here for?”
Loki took a deep breath. “Brother, I need your assistance.”
“Sorry, what?” Thor leaned closer to the surface of the water. “What was that? I can’t hear you.”
“I need your assistance.”
“Once more.” Loki might have fallen for the trick had Thor not done a theatrical cupping of his hand around one ear to punctuate it.
Loki rolled his eyes. “You really are the worst, brother.”
Thor, still committed to his cupped hand, accidentally leaned too low and splashed the surface of the water. “Did I hear correctly? You need my assistance?”
“Don’t make me say it again,” Loki grumbled. “I’ll turn to stone.”
Theo hadn’t returned when Loki poured the water back into the pitcher and set it in its place on the office shelves. He looked around at the cramped space and was horrified to realize he would miss it. What was happening to him?
Loki left the shop, the hanging sign clattering against its chains as it swung in the breeze, and began to walk, not certain where he was going until he found himself outside the door to Theo’s flat. He’d been staying there since the first night Theo had invited him. He’d been staying there and had never looked at the books. Why had Amora told him to?
Ignore her, he told himself as he opened the door to the flat. She was jealous. She was goading you. She was afraid. She was lashing out.
Everything was the same as they had left it that morning. A pair of Theo’s socks were crumpled on the end of the bed, and his towel had slid off the bar of the washing table. Loki picked it up, folding it neatly before replacing it and trying not to look at the books. Which was difficult, since there were more books in the room than anything else.
Feeling watched, even though the room was too small for anyone to hide in, Loki crossed to one of the stacks and began to peruse the titles. It only took him a few minutes to find the volume Theo had been reading when Loki had found him waiting at the Inferno Club. When Theo had followed him there. The script along the spine was small, but he recognized the bloodred binding and lifted it off the top of one of the piles. Tales from the North. He hadn’t thought anything of it then. He crouched down and tipped the cover open.
The first page was the title, Tales from the North, followed by A Dictionary of the Myth, Lore, and Legends of the Old Norse. On the page opposite, there was an illustration of a ship. Loki froze. It was familiar to him in the same way the items in the museum were. The shape of the sail, the engravings along the mast, the curling head of the bow. The ship was breaking over an icy wave, and on its deck were illustrations of what looked like Asgardian warriors.
These were the tales the humans had of Asgard.
He vaguely remembered one of his cultural tutors mentioning this—that in past generations, some humans had had an awareness of Asgard, and had worshiped the Asgardians as gods. They had written their stories, and used Loki’s family as an example to teach their children not to be vain or prideful, to be brave and true, not to seek mischief. And now he held a collection of those stories, tales of what may be humanity’s past but perhaps were Asgard’s future. Time did not always take a straight path forward. He certainly hadn’t lived any epic-worthy poems yet.
But Theo had known him, before they ever met.
His fingers hovered over the next page. There would be no going back. There was no way to know if he was in this book, or what weight these words might hold. You cannot live to fulfill or avoid what may come to pass, his mother had told him on the day he had broken the Godseye Mirror. He couldn’t know if these stories even were the future, or just inventions of human minds.
He turned the page.
Images flashed across his vision as he skimmed the book. Ships. Swords. Dragons. Some of the same stories of Asgard’s glorious past that he’d been raised on. He stopped, his fingers hovering over an illustration of a man with dark hair and an overstressed pointed chin, his lips spread in a leering, wicked grin. A hard, unflattering portrait of a man with a sharp smile and a cruel stare, beneath the title Loki, the Trickster. God of Chaos. A few words and phrases jumped out at him.
Vain.
Shallow.
Manipulative.
A cruel predator.
The father of lies.
He cheats.
He steals.
Murderer.
Villainous.
Villain.
Was this a description of him? Was this what he was, or what he would become? If the humans knew these stories, did that mean they had already happened? Time, he knew, was a slippery, changeable thing. But villain? Is that what he was destined to be? Was there even any point in trying to do the right thing if his future was already written in the myths, if he was the antagonist of everyone else’s stories?
The floorboards creaked, and Loki looked up. Theo was standing in the doorway of the bedroom—Loki hadn’t bothered to close it. “What are you doing?” Theo asked, but it sounded less like a question and more like he already knew.
Loki slammed the book shut as he pushed himself to his feet. “Just some light reading to pass the time.”
He wasn’t certain if he imagined it, but Theo seemed to lean away from him. His grip on his cane shifted. “I wanted to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Loki said. “That before I even arrived, you all had made up your minds about me? You had decided I was not to be trusted, that I was slippery and cruel and wily, because of a lot of old stories you had read about me? How disappointed you must have been when it was me who showed up instead of my brother with sunshine spurting out of his ass. I’m sure this book”—he flung the volume onto the ground between them—“has some very flattering things to say about him. Because he’s the hero, isn’t he? He was always going to be the hero. And I’m not. I could descend from the heavens surrounded in angelic light and give everyone in your realm cheese sandwiches and a unicorn, and you would all still know me only as the villain from the stories.”
“I didn’t know what else to think!” Theo replied. “It’s all we have. These stories don’t come from nowhere, do they? They’re rooted in something. They told us who you are.”
“No one gave me much of a say in who I am. You think my father and my b
rother are so wonderful and brave because some book told you so? Here’s the truth: Odin doesn’t give a damn about your little society. He doesn’t give you a thought. Mrs. Sharp’s husband died because you humans don’t matter to him. He didn’t care enough to send help, or even consider it. I’m here because he’s punishing me—you’re my punishment. You are all wasting your time—wasting your lives—thinking you matter to the ruler of the known universe or that you’re doing something to keep the Nine Realms in balance. You’re nothing—not to Odin, and not to me.”
He didn’t wait for Theo to reply. He pushed past him, out the door and into the hallway. He heard Theo call after him, but he didn’t turn. His father had taught him that only the weakest of warriors looked behind at their home. They kept their eyes forward, knowing the points of the swords landed where their eyes rested.
Amora was in her dressing room when Loki opened the door without knocking. She was curled in a chair beside the fire, a steaming cup of tea on the table next to her, and her fingers tangled in her long hair, working it from its knots as she skimmed the newspaper on her lap.
She looked up as he entered. “What are you doing here?”
Loki didn’t reply. Instead, he pulled a stool up beside her, reached into his coat, and withdrew a pouch that he dropped onto the table with a hollow clatter. The drawstring was loose, and the leather slipped back to reveal the glittering shine of the five stolen Norn Stones.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s be villains.”
Amora reached out and touched a finger to the surface of one of the Stones. It sparked gold where her skin met it. “Where did you get these?”
“I stole them.”
“From who?”
“Who do you think?” he snapped. He felt frayed and skittish, still raw from what he’d read in Theo’s book. “From Karnilla.”
“You’re the thief your father has been looking for.” She plucked one from the rough material of the pouch, holding it up to examine. The Stones were each slightly smaller than her palm, angular and translucent. Colorless. “And what exactly were you planning to do with them?”
