Monsters : I Bring the Fire Part II (A Loki Story)

by C. Gockel

  Loki’s eyes flit briefly to Steve and then he looks back to Amy. “I’m sorry. I would offer to try and help. But I really am hopeless when it comes to fixing things. I’m better at —”

  “Setting things on fire?” says Steve.

  Both Loki and Amy turn to Steve.

  “You pointed a gun at me,” Loki says.

  “But it wouldn’t have hurt you,” Amy says, brow furrowing. “You are in your astral form.”

  “You set my desk on fire,” says Steve, in the same sort of calm voice you might use to comment on the weather.

  Loki winces and turns to her. “You know how it is. Lately, when I’m excited...” He raises his hands. “Poof.”

  “Like the candles in the living room and the kitchen?” says Amy, remembering him setting them alight.

  “Yes,” says Loki, nodding earnestly. He looks down. “And those pictures in Malson’s portfolio.”

  “Oh,” says Amy, going cold. She couldn’t fault him for that. If she could burn the images from that psychopath’s collection from her brain she would. Amy glances at Steve, his eyes are narrowed, and he’s looking between the two of them, but he’s quiet.

  “It does happen when he’s upset,” says Amy.

  “Hmmmm....” says Steve. He doesn’t even look mad anymore. Or frightened. Which is creepy. Granted, he’s had a little experience with Norse so-called-god types himself, so maybe that’s why he’s so put together...although it seems unfair that he seems to have pulled himself together a lot faster than she did.

  Leaning in closer Loki says, “There is something in the basement of the building down the street, Amy. Something very dangerous. Something very dangerous things will want.”

  Amy shivers and Loki looks at Steve. “It would be for the best if you let me help you get rid of it. But to get rid of it, I first have to break through that nasty outer containment field.”

  “The Promethean Sphere around the World Seed!” says Amy. She knows because it was mentioned in Steve’s file. Steve’s eyes flash to hers.

  Uh-oh.

  Loki smiles gently. “Is that what they’re calling the containment sphere? Do you know where they got the technology Amy? It looks vaguely Vanir, but mutated. I need to understand it if I’m to...fix it.”

  The Promethean Sphere was just a side note in the file. Shaking her head vigorously, she looks at Steve.

  Narrowing his eyes at Loki he says, “You know, you could be one of those very bad things.”

  “He’s not really bad,” says Amy. “You should have met Thor. He was a creep. And Loki didn’t try to strangle you...” She stops herself just before she says, like Odin.

  Both Loki and Steve’s eyes slide to her. Steve looks angry. Loki looks bemused. “Your own intelligence says I’m the good guy,” says Loki, eyes sliding back to Steve.

  Steve’s brow furrows. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Giving a twisted smile, Loki tilts his head. And then he looks back at Amy. “I never renege on my oaths, Amy.” He winks. And then he’s gone. No poof, or pop, or anything.

  Amy looks back at Steve and wrings her hands.

  “How did you know about the Promethean Sphere?” he says quietly.

  Amy looks at the red file she dropped on the ground. Steve follows her eyes. And then he looks back at his desk, covered under fire extinguisher foam. For the first time Amy notices the smell of burnt plastic in the air.

  She looks at Steve and swallows. Prepared for, “You’re fired, or you’re going to jail,” she nearly jumps when Steve says, “Do you have a jacket or anything at your desk?”

  “Uh...no,” says Amy. His eyes flit to her chest and the tight lacey undershirt she’s wearing. She crosses her arms again.

  Steve turns around, goes to a duffel and pulls out a large gray sweatshirt that says Marines in black letters. “You can wear this,” he says, carefully keeping his eyes on hers. She pulls it over her head. It smells like Tide and duffel bag vinyl. Walking past her he says, “Let’s go find an office that isn’t filled with poisonous fumes.”

  x x x x

  Sitting in a conference room, Steve opens a laptop, turns it on, and checks the Promethean counter next to him. The beige device has a circular head the size of a petri dish attached to a handle. The head of the device has a flat circular screen. Right now the screen is slate gray. In the presence of dark energy, or as some of the tech guys around here scientifically call it, ‘magic,’ it glows blue. Steve had one at his desk. It had begun to glow just before the apparition calling itself Loki popped into the room.

  Across from him is Amy Lewis, the receptionist he had flagged as a classic example of government waste. She may have just saved his life. Though she seems to think Loki’s setting his desk on fire was an accident, Steve knows better. Loki started the fire on purpose. But Steve doesn’t disabuse her of the notion of his innocence. Something is tickling at the back of Steve’s mind, and he doesn’t want to give up any cards just yet.

  He glances up at Amy, now wearing his sweatshirt. It is a very weird ending to a very weird day and a truly bizarre week.

  Merryl had drawn Steve into ADUO just days after the incident under CBOE. Merryl said someone with Steve’s military experience and ‘people skills’ would be a great asset to a department that was largely techies and lawyers that the Bureau couldn’t place anywhere else.

  Steve has ambitions of leaving the Bureau and getting into politics someday; joining an obscure department like ADUO diverts those plans for a while, but he does have priorities. Seeing that the country's third largest metropolis doesn’t blow up is at the top of the list. He may not know exactly what the World Seed thing is, but he knows it isn’t good.

  And now there are the events in Wyoming.

  This morning Steve received a call at 0400 from Assistant Director James Merryl. The first words out of Merryl’s lips over the phone were, “Steve, there is an outbreak of trolls in Wyoming. I have to be out of the office this week. I’d like you to take over.”

  It was a bad idea. Steve’s not up to speed yet on anything. He’s been too busy helping to secure the perimeter around the World Seed and keeping the damn thing’s presence quiet. He’s barely familiar with the local staff. And he only knows a bit about the Promethean devices — the magic detectors and containment fields. The technology was given to ADUO by an operative code-named Prometheus. No one seems to know who he is or where he came from. Or if they do they’re not telling Steve.

  But considering it was 4 in the morning, it’s understandable that the first words out of Steve’s mouth weren’t something logical and coherent like, “Do you think that’s wise when I’m so new to the department,” or even, “Yes, Sir, thank you, sir.” Instead Steve said, “Trolls...on the internet?”

  Merryl’s response was, “No, Steve, more like the Incredible Hulk. You’ll be fine.” There was yelling in the background and then Merryl said, “The damn thing isn’t dead. I have to go.”

  So here he is playing catch up after nearly getting himself toasted by an entity that may or may not be a Norse god.

  Shaking his head, Steve hits a button on the laptop on the conference room table. Amy Lewis’ file opens. A few days ago Steve asked Merryl about Amy and Merryl had said, “Read her file.” Steve assumed that meant the pretty receptionist without any security clearance reading a magazine during his tour wasn’t important enough to discuss.

  He skims through the first pages and puts his hand to his jaw. What was the adage? Never assume. It makes an ass of you and me. He sighs. He does feel like an ass. Merryl brought Amy into ADUO because having her work for him in the office meant he didn’t have to have a security detail stalking her 24/7. Steve’s boss had figured, correctly, Loki might come to call on her again.

  More than that, although Steve had taken the girl for an unambitious leech on the government payroll, she actually looks like a good kid from rough beginnings. Her dad, now in jail for fraud, split when she was little, her mom has been marrie
d 5 times. Amy left home as soon as she was 18 and moved in with her grandparents. She got her GED in Chicago, went to community college, earned straight A’s, and then went to the University of Illinois on scholarship where she earned a degree in biochemistry. She got a full ride to vet school from there.

  And then she met Loki — during a run in with serial killer Ed Malson on a highway late at night. He taps a finger on the desk and scowls. “So this Loki character saved your life?” By beating Malson to death with a small log.

  She jumps in her chair and then says, “Yes. He heard me somehow — I think like Odin heard you...”

  She stops.

  Steve shrugs. “You were filing, you saw the red folder, you were so shocked when you pulled it out of the box it fell out of your hands, you couldn’t help but see certain details.”

  Amy’s eyes go wide.

  Steve restrains a sigh. “Because that’s how it happened. Right?”

  “Okay,” says Amy slowly, as though unsure.

  Steve nods. “What do you know about this ‘hearing’?” Because he’s pretty damn curious. Having his mind read is one of the most frustrating things he’s ever experienced.

  Amy looks away again. “From what Loki told me they — Asgardians, and I guess frost giants — they hear people in their heads if it relates to their higher purpose somehow.”

  Steve leans back as much as he can in the conference room chair and taps his hand on the desk. “And what is that purpose, do you think?”

  Shrugging, Amy still doesn’t look at him. “Odin is the king or chief of the gods. Loki is the trickster and god of mischief and lies. Loki brings about the end of the world — supposedly, in the myths.”

  “And you brought him home,” says Steve, rubbing his eyes. Just like an injured bird.

  Amy looks sharply at him. “It wasn’t the brightest idea, I know. But he had nowhere to go, or I thought he didn’t, and he really isn’t that bad. And I don’t think he realized the consequences of his actions when he took all of my money, really. And he has set things on fire...accidentally.”

  Steve should put her in witness protection, right now.

  But...

  There is a large pulsing thing under the streets of Chicago that sucks anything that touches its shell, the Promethean Sphere, into never-never land. In a matter of weeks the top of the thing’s shell will come into contact with the bottom of the foundation of Chicago’s Board of Trade and no one knows what will happen. In Amy’s little interaction with Loki, Steve’s picked up something that hasn’t been mentioned by anyone when the subject of the Promethean devices has come up.

  He taps his hand on the conference table. “So when he said that the technology looked Vanir...do you have any idea what that meant?”

  Looking up, she purses her lips. “The Vanir are one of the races of the nine realms. Not much is known about them, really. They had some big war with the Aesir —”

  “The Aesir?” says Steve.

  “Yes. Odin’s people.”

  “And Loki’s?” says Steve.

  She shakes her head. “No, he’s Jotunn, a frost giant.” She holds up her hands, as though she’s afraid Steve will react in some undesirable way. “But he knows it, not like in the movies where he goes crazy when he learns that he is actually not an Aesir.”

  Steve stares at her blankly. He seems to remember a movie a while back with Loki as the bad guy, some superhero flick. Steve hasn’t been interested in superhero flicks since he was a kid, though.

  She swallows. “But he does turn blue...like the movies, but he says frost giants aren’t blue....” Brow furrowing she whispers, “And when he turns blue he gets really self-conscious about it and grumpy.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Steve, wondering if this is relevant.

  He tilts his head. “You said higher purpose...and gods...do you think they’re gods?”

  Amy makes a face like she’s just eaten something distasteful. “No. A god wouldn’t be so interested in my boobs.”

  Steve laughs, because it’s funny, but also because he’s relieved. She’s not that naive.

  Bowing her head, Amy laughs, too. After a moment, she says, “So you aren’t going to fire me?”

  There is no way Steve is going to lose his connection to these...whatevers. He gives her his most calculated charming smile. “Nope.”

  She scowls a tiny bit as though she’s studying him. Her lips purse. “May I go?”

  Steve looks back to the computer and all the material he has to read — he hates reading on the screen and silently curses Loki for charring his paper copies.

  “You can, for now,” he says. “I’ll call you in if I have any questions.”

  Amy gets up and practically scrambles out the door.

  Steve turns back to the computer. He remains there long after Amy goes home. He’s not just reading her file, but there is something in her file that keeps drawing him back.

  When Loki, under the alias of Thor Odinson, was released from police custody after slaying Ed Malson, it was due to the interference of ADUO. The department had intelligence that tagged Loki as “the good guy.” More specifically, that intelligence had come in the form of a phone call to ADUO’s directors in Washington.

  The phone call had come from Prometheus.

  Chapter 2

  Loki walks down a tree lined street in one of Chicago’s residential neighborhoods. Beyond the red mist that is Cera’s presence are brownstones he’d guess to be no more than a hundred years old. He’s wearing his armor, but to any observer it would look like he’s wearing a pair of faded black jeans that sit a little too low, a gray tee that is too loose, and a fedora. He looks like a wandering minstrel of this age, which fits with the very real guitar case he’s carrying.

  He has a headache, as he has nearly constantly since he left Amy and Beatrice to track Cera down. His headache is not helped by the fact that Cera is whining again, in Russian. Cera only speaks Russian. “I’m trapped! I’m trapped! Have you forsaken me?”

  Scowling, Loki clenches his teeth. Not for the first time, he wishes the Promethean Sphere was strong enough to contain all of Cera, instead of just doing a bang up job of keeping him out.

  In Russian he says, “I will release you as soon as I figure out how to get through the Promethean Sphere.” As though chasing her literally across the globe only to lose her in a port in Karachi doesn’t prove his dedication.

  “I don’t see how going to see the human helps,” says Cera, swirling around him in agitation.

  Loki scowls. Demanding, insolent, stupid creature. She is so locked in the rules of the quantum world she can’t even grasp the concept of relative position and couldn’t, until recently, even give him her exact location..

  “I am in her debt,” he mutters. “And she is my one link to the inner workings of ADUO. I need to get back in her good graces.”

  Not that Loki wouldn’t pay her back anyway.

  He stops in front of a slightly sunken crumbling three story building he’s identified as Amy’s new address. Set back from the road, the building has sunk to nearly six feet below street level in Chicago’s soft soil. The ground in front of it has been dug out to form a little yard area. Steps lead down from the sidewalk to a brick walkway that crosses the yard. There is a unit at ground level with rusting bars on the windows, and a staircase, newer and better maintained, leading up to a unit above it.

  Loki hops down the first steps and saunters over to the door of the lower unit. He knocks. There is no answer.

  Closing his eyes, he sends an astral projection of himself into the dwelling. Amy’s new home is one small open room divided by a low bookshelf into a living area by the door and a bedroom further in. Past the bedroom is a bathroom, closet, and a kitchen with a counter against the far wall. In the kitchen is a door that leads out to another yard. It is humble by North American standards, but absolutely palatial compared to some of the dwellings he saw and frequented during his search for Cera.

  He sees no s
ign of Fenrir. Amy is bent over something on the kitchen counter Loki can’t see. There is a pot boiling on the stove.

  He knocks again.

  She doesn’t even look over her shoulder.

  Loki turns around and surveys the street. He sees an unmarked car with a gentleman sitting in it drinking a coffee.

  “They see us. They know we’re here! Leave!” Cera cries. Loki rolls his eyes. Only since he’s known Cera has she developed the ability to ‘see.’ For a while she could merely sense magic. It took her a long time to understand that the patterns in the photons bouncing in her direction meant something. Now that she does see she thinks she understands.

  Instead of following Cera’s advice, Loki raises his hand, smiles and waves at the agent. The ADUO agent puts his coffee down on his lap and picks up his phone but makes no move to leave the car.

  Loki turns back to the door. Tired of waiting, he considers using one of the many lockpicks he keeps in the cuff of his armor to open it — just to keep his non-magic lock-picking skills up to snuff. But thinking better of it, he takes a half step back, waggles his fingers dramatically in the air, and produces a useless flair of green light.

  The lock barely even clicks as it disengages, and Amy is too caught up in whatever she is doing to notice when he enters. Schooling the scowl off his face, Loki says brightly, “Amy, so good to see you again!”

  Amy jumps and turns her head, eyes wide. There is a flapping noise, and she turns back to the counter and leans over quickly. Something scoots under her arm and there is a thud. Loki blinks. There is a pigeon on the floor holding its wing at an awkward angle.

  Turning around and diving for the bird, Amy says angrily, “You scared Fred!”

  Loki blinks. He looks at the pot on the stove. “Are you butchering it? I can help; I love squab, and I’m famished.”

  Amy’s face contorts into a look of horror. “I am not going to eat him. I was changing the dressing on his wing!”

  Loki’s eyes go to the side. Belatedly he notices a large bird cage in the living room. Oops.