Loki

by Mackenzi Lee

  “I’ll get it right.”

  “You start here,” she said, tipping her head toward the end of the hallway nearest them. “I’ll go to the other side. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  As Amora retreated, Loki approached the first corpse. A middle-aged man with dark hair salted with gray, and a neatly clipped beard. His eyes seemed closed so lightly that Loki almost expected that when he touched him, he’d wake. But he didn’t have the Norn Stones on him this time. Somehow, these living dead were eerier in the dark, and alone, in the morgue with a hallway full of them.

  Loki took the man by the chin and pried his mouth open. He and Amora had discussed where they might put the rune—nowhere that would be visible when the corpses were re-dressed and packed into their coffins. There had seemed only one option, but Loki felt his skin crawl more than he had expected when he reached into the man’s mouth and pried his tongue from it. He had a strong inclination to pull his hand away—like he was afraid the man might bite him—but instead, on the tip of the man’s tongue, he carved a delicate imitation of the rune on his palm. Blood bubbled up to the surface, and Loki doubted suddenly whether he was right—perhaps these people weren’t dead after all. Perhaps their souls still existed somewhere. The dead didn’t bleed, did they?

  But this was what he’d chosen. Too late to start feeling empathy now.

  He dabbed the blood from the man’s mouth with the inside of his sleeve, then moved down the row to the next body.

  He worked quickly and methodically, trying not to think about the warm flesh beneath his hands, how alive these people still felt to him. What Gem had said. He was in the second hallway, prying apart the jaws of a woman whose rotted teeth splintered from the force, when he heard the door at the end open—not the door to the hallway, but the one the public used. He ducked behind the table, crouching out of sight. Heeled footsteps echoed through the hallway. Not Gem—his boots wouldn’t click so loudly.

  Then Loki heard, through the darkness, his own name. “Loki.”

  A shadow blotted the glass, accompanied by a long beam of golden light that bobbed across the floor.

  He stood, and the light stopped. “Mrs. Sharp.”

  They met on either side of the glass. The beam of the lantern she unveiled turned it veined and gold as she held up a hand, tracing the shape of him, still glamoured in her form, against the pane. “Well, that certainly is eerie. Particularly with the glass here.” She rapped one knuckle against it and it rang. “It’s like looking in a mirror that has gone rogue on you.

  “How did you know I was here?” Loki asked.

  “Gem alerted me,” Mrs. S. replied. “Though he said you did quite an impression.”

  As she raised the lantern, Loki realized what it was that had tipped Gem off to who he was—on Mrs. Sharp’s left hand, the gleam of her wedding band. He’d forgotten it.

  “What do you want?” Loki asked, trying to paper over any cracks in his voice with the strength of it, but he didn’t feel strong.

  “Looking for you,” she replied. “We’ve been worried.”

  “For me or the rest of the world?”

  “Theo told me what happened.”

  “What do you mean what happened?” he demanded. “That I learned my own story?”

  The beam of the lantern guttered, then flared. Mrs. S. sucked in her cheeks. “I didn’t know how much you knew.”

  “None of it,” he said. “But it’s already been written. It’s been told and retold. You humans know everything about me, so what choice do I have?”

  “Everything’s a choice,” she replied, her breath fogging the glass between them as she leaned in. “There’s always a choice.”

  “Then I choose to be what you all think of me.”

  She smiled sadly. “That’s disappointing.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No,” she replied. “But I wish it could be different. I wish so many things could be different. For all of us.”

  He saw Amora before Mrs. S. did, moving silently through the darkness like a shadow with her knife raised. A warning itched at the back of his throat as Mrs. S. touched the tips of her fingers to the glass, her lips parting to say more.

  But then she caught the reflection in the dark glass and gasped, just as Amora struck her in the back of the head with the hilt of her dagger. Mrs. S. collapsed, the lantern tumbling from her hand and cracking against the tile. Amora caught her, forcing her to her knees and pressing the blade to her throat.

  She looked at Loki. So did Mrs. S. Through the darkness, he felt their eyes upon him. He felt his fingers brush the glass, then fall. He did not know what he wanted. He did not know who he was. Everyone knew but him.

  Amora buried the knife in Mrs. Sharp’s throat, then pulled it across, severing her neck. The blood was bright and jeweled through the darkness. It coursed down her front in thick rivulets that shimmered in the beam of her lantern, the candle still stubbornly burning. Through the glass, he heard the rush of air as it left her throat. Her body spasmed, and Amora released her, letting her body fall, still thrashing, to the ground. The glass between him and Amora was speckled with blood.

  Amora could have stolen Mrs. S.’s energy. She could have drained her and left her here in the morgue with the other dead, carved a rune on her tongue and raised her as a soldier, one more to join their ranks. But instead she had buried Loki’s knife in her throat and let her blood stain the floor. If she hadn’t thought herself a murderer before, in spite of the hallways of humans laid out at her hand, she couldn’t have hidden from it now.

  Everything was a choice. Amora had made hers.

  And Loki had let it happen.

  He dropped his hand from where his fingers had pressed to the window, half expecting to see the blood there too.

  On Sunday morning, the train station was packed. Not just with mourners in their black crepe and veils, but men and women from every class in London who had come to gawk at the Necropolis Railway full of the living dead, like they’d never seen a train before and hadn’t been staring at the bodies on display in the Southwark Morgue for weeks. The coffins were lined up on a barge with its back to the station, bobbing in the black water of the Thames. The day was appropriately gray, with heavy swirls of clouds so low they masked out the industrial smoke.

  Loki and Amora stood on the platform with the queue of passengers waiting to board. They were both dressed in black, high-collared jackets and donned dark glasses in spite of the overcast day. No one looked twice at them. The mood on the platform was making Loki jumpy. With a crowd gathered around to witness a grizzly spectacle yet again, there was the same mismatched jumble of emotions as outside the morgue. The same merchants who had been hawking their wares at the morgue were here, offering bags of toasted chestnuts and postcards for sale. A group of children were running wild between the passengers waiting to board, their shrieks of laughter drowned by a bell from the station. He didn’t like the mix. He wanted one feeling, one emotion, one face for him to read.

  The policemen milling around seemed to share his discomfort. They had their truncheons out, or one hand resting upon them on their waists, prowling the crowd unsure of what trouble they’d have to quell. Loki shifted his weight on his flat shoes. He missed his heeled boots. He missed his black nails and his tunics, and he missed Asgard, he realized. He missed his home.

  The line edged forward, and as Loki moved with it, someone knocked into his shoulder, hard enough that he stumbled. On instinct, he grabbed the man, keeping them both upright, and felt the hard tip of a cane smash into his toe.

  “Sorry,” the man said, and they both looked up.

  It was Theo.

  His eyes widened when he saw Loki, and then he let out an astonished laugh. “You.”

  “Theo—” He reached out, not knowing what a consoling touch could offer, but Theo batted his hand out of the air.

  “You are bloody relentless, aren’t you?”

  “What are you doing here?” Loki asked.r />
  “Mourning,” Theo replied, and his voice cracked.

  Loki glanced at the barge, still heavy with coffins. “Is Mrs. S....” he started, but the words died in his throat as Theo’s eyes narrowed.

  “How did you know she died?” he asked, but it didn’t sound like a question. It sounded like he already knew what Amora had done. What Loki had done.

  “I...” Loki started, but a sharp whistle from the conductor cut the air. “They’re boarding.” He went to step past Theo and join Amora on the platform, but Theo stepped into his path, slapping his shins with his cane. Loki stopped, startled.

  “Did you kill her?” Theo asked, and he sounded so tired. “Please, tell me you didn’t...”

  “I didn’t,” he said. His heart was twisting like a rag wrung dry, but he snapped before he could stop himself, “Though I don’t suppose you believe me, do you? What was it your book called me, father of lies?”

  Amora appeared suddenly at Loki’s side, taking him by the arm. “Come on.”

  Theo let out an astonished laugh. “Oh, good, you’re here, too? What a pair you are.”

  “Stay out of this, Mr. Bell,” Amora said, her voice quiet. “This is not your concern.”

  “I’m not letting either of you on this train.” Theo grabbed Loki, yanking him away from Amora, then reached suddenly into the pocket of his coat and drew out his wallet. He thrust it at Loki and, perhaps out of surprise or confusion, Loki took it. “Help! Police!” Theo shrieked, and Loki started. “I’m being robbed.”

  “Theo, wait—”

  “Help!” Theo shouted again, loud enough that the crowd around them seemed to shrink away in unison, creating an unmistakable perimeter. “Help! I’m being robbed!”

  Loki tried to pull away and dropped the wallet, but Theo grabbed him by the front of the shirt, pinning him in place against him. His cane fell between them with a clatter like a gunshot, and several people jumped in surprise at the sound.

  Amora was melting into the crowd, her head tipped down so that the brim of her bonnet obscured her features. “Don’t—” Theo started to shout after her, but Loki called over top of him, “Get on, I’ll find you.”

  A police officer shoved his way through the crowd toward them, a middle-aged man with sagging jowls and a thudding step. “Is there a problem, gentlemen?” he asked, pushing up his hat with the end of his truncheon.

  “This man just reached into my coat and tried to grab my wallet!” Theo said, shoving Loki away from him and pointing an accusatory finger.

  Loki quickly decided the best way to extract himself from this situation was to appear to be the far more rational and less hysterical of the two of them, so he pinned on his best approximation of a warm smile for the officer, though he had very little warmth left in his heart. “Sir, allow me to explain.”

  But Theo pressed on, limping up to the officer and grabbing his arm. “You can’t let him on the train, he’ll probably rob everyone on board blind. Can you imagine what sort of wickedness it takes to rob mourners?”

  This was becoming a scene. The line was stalled behind them, and people were craning their necks to see what was happening. Several women nearby clutched their purses against their chests, like Loki might suddenly snatch them.

  The policeman shook Theo off his arm, then held out a hand to Loki, gesturing him back toward the train station. When Loki didn’t move, the officer seized him by the shoulder and dragged him down the platform, away from the train. “All right, there, mister, let’s you and I go for a walk.”

  “Please, there’s been a mistake—”

  The officer didn’t let him go. “Well, then, this shouldn’t take long.”

  Panic rose in Loki’s throat. The clock above the rail station struck quarter to eleven. Fifteen minutes until the train departed. He looked around for Theo, but the crowd had already funneled back into the space they had created around them and he was gone.

  The officer dragged Loki into the station and shoved him into one of the chairs near the ticket desk. Curious, the ticket clerk looked up.

  “All right then, friend,” the officer said, holding out a hand. “Let’s see your ticket.”

  Loki handed over the boarding card, and the officer examined it carefully, then held it up to the light. “Want to explain what happened back there?” he asked, still squinting at the ticket like he was searching for a flaw.

  “Just a misunderstanding,” Loki said, already half standing in preparation for bolting toward the exit. “I wasn’t watching where I was going and I bumped into that, uh, young man and he misinterpreted my intentions as malicious. That’s all.” Out on the platform, he heard the train whistle. He could still make it.

  “And his wallet?” the officer asked. “If you just knocked shoulders, how did it end up in your hands?”

  “It wasn’t in my hands,” Loki replied. “If you’d been observing the actual scene and not just the hysteria of it, you would have seen it on the pavement between us. He must have dropped it.”

  “Let’s just make sure it didn’t happen to fall into your jacket, shall we?” The policeman reached for Loki’s pockets to pat him down, but Loki slapped the policeman’s hand out of the air hard, grabbed his other wrist, then dealt him a sharp uppercut to the chin. The policeman reeled backward, a thin dribble of blood trickling from his nose. Behind the counter, the ticket clerk let out a little shriek, and when Loki looked at him, he fumbled a door open at the back of the booth and disappeared.

  The officer shook his head a few times, then pressed two fingers to his nose. He swore, eyes darting back to Loki. Loki leaped for the door, but the officer grabbed him by the collar of his coat, dragging him backward in a sharp, unexpected tug. Loki lost his footing and crashed into the officer, sending them both tumbling to the ground.

  The officer was fumbling for a silver whistle hanging about his neck. Loki swatted for it, but the policeman dodged and gave it a sharp blow. A single high, piercing scream straight in Loki’s ear. Loki drew a knife from his sleeve, then rolled off the officer and to his feet. The officer was clambering up too, his boots clomping heavily on the tile. Standard issue, probably given to him with the rest of his uniform. They looked too big for him, judging by his size and the sloppy gait.

  Loki aimed and threw the knife, one precise blow into the toe of the man’s boot. The man cried out—not in pain, but surprise—as the toe of his boot was skewered to the ground, pinning him in place. He tried to yank it from the floor, but the Asgardian steel stuck fast. He reached for his whistle again, but Loki grabbed the chain before the officer could and ripped it from his neck, then tucked it into his own pocket.

  There were more police on the platform. They would have been alerted by the noise of the whistle. The clerk at the ticket window had disappeared as well, likely to call for help. The knife wouldn’t hold this man for long—the blade would stay embedded in the soft tile, but the officer would likely think to take off his boot after a few more minutes of that hard tugging, once his panic had quieted. Loki wasn’t sure where his train ticket had disappeared to, and he wasn’t going to hang around to find out. He took off toward the back of the station building. There had to be a door, something for staff, somewhere people could exit discreetly if needed.

  He picked a hallway at random, trying to find windows and follow the sallow light. When he finally located a back door, it opened onto the dock behind the station, where the barges brought caskets in from the city to be buried. There were still a few dozen waiting to be loaded onto the train, a handful of dockworkers lifting each coffin between them and hauling it up the steep stairs leading up the riverbank and to the platform where the train was waiting.

  How cruelly ironic, he thought as he ducked behind a shipping container and waited for the next gap in the workers. He’d be leaving Earth the same way he’d arrived: in a box.

  The bodies of the living dead may not have stunk, but the coffin did. Curled beneath the lid, cuddled up with one of those warm bodies, Loki
tried not to retch as his throat was flooded with the smell of rot and mold. He felt the coffin rise as he was lifted into the train. “Heavy one, this,” a worker said, the words muffled by the wood. Loki felt the sharp incline when they took the stairs, and his head banged sharply against the end of the coffin. He closed his eyes. It was already dark enough that he could hardly see, but the symbolism of the gesture helped.

  There was a lurch, and then the coffin stopped moving and everything was still. Loki waited, trying to decide if he was on the train yet or not. Then another lift, this one at an incline as though he were being hoisted, then he heard the scrape of the wood as the box was slid into a slot like he was being buried in a vault. He lay still, listening to the scrapes of the other coffins being loaded, then the roll of the grating as the car doors were dragged shut and locked.

  He waited until he heard the first screech of the train wheels on the track, felt the car heave forward. The coffin listed with it, testing its tethers. As the train began to pick up speed, Loki wiggled his legs free and kicked at the lid. It took three sharp hits before it burst off, knocking the coffin stacked on top askew as well, and his coffin tipped, the lid cracking when it hit the ground. Loki clambered out, stumbling as he struggled to find his footing on the rocking train. He had to get to the front.

  The compartment door was locked, but he knocked it open with a spell and stepped out onto the small platform at the front of the car. The wind immediately ripped at him, tearing his hat from his head and tossing it into the passing countryside. They were still in the city, but the houses had become cleaner and farther apart. A few chickens wandered along the tracks, pecking at weeds springing up between the stones.

  He couldn’t tell how many cars were between him and the passenger carriages. His and Amora’s plan had been to discreetly make their way to the center of the train and spread their spell outward, then uncouple the cars holding the live humans from those with the dead. He needed to find her. He grabbed hold of the ladder beside the door and hauled himself up onto the roof of the train.