by B. C. James
Freya recounted the story of the attack on her by the Grey Man and how Odin had sent her brother Frey after her as well. She was brutally honest about how she was coming to Thor in the hopes of gaining his protection. This sort of honesty was new to Freya. Her M.O. was generally to use lies and charm on a target until they didn’t know which way was up. Eventually, they would hand over whatever she needed as a gift without her ever having to admit she was actually in dire need.
Thor, Freya, and Baldr all seemed to be in the same boat. Each of them fell squarely into the category of “the hunted.” And while the events surrounding the three of them had originally occurred miles apart, even Helen Keller could see they were all connected. Odin was obviously involved, and there were a lot of pieces moving in the shadows.
After Baldr had dressed in the dead man’s clothing, Freya went to work on his hair. Most of the agents favored the classic, Johnny Unitas-style haircut, but Baldr’s long mane would stand out. She grabbed some products from her bag, combed his hair down, and locked it in place with a spray-gel that could have cemented the stones of the Great Pyramid together. She then stuffed the rest of his hair down the back of his shirt. From a distance he wouldn’t attract any undue attention.
After putting the deceased’s agent in Baldr’s place, they left the cell and made their way to the area where Freya had overheard Simmons saying Thor was being held. They walked a few dozen yards down the hall from where Baldr was imprisoned to another corridor where they expected to find Thor. They peered around the corner and saw that the door was guarded by a single agent. Freya put down her bag and began to mess a bit with her hair. Baldr just looked at her a little sideways.
“What are you doing Freya? Do you plan on dating him to death?”
She continued to primp. “Nope, I plan on distracting him and then caving his face in while he’s too busy eye-humping me to defend himself.”
Baldr simply shook his head. “That’s never going to work. This guy is professional—CIA, or FBI, or FDA, or…well…something with three letters and a bad attitude. If they’ve been trained to resist water boarding and torture, I think they have enough intestinal fortitude to resist the charms of someone who looks like a walking Penthouse Forum letter.”
Freya smoothed her skirt and adjusted her Spanx to give the most visually pleasing effect. “Oh really?”
“Yeah, really. You have no chance, and I will be right back in a dark cell where I started.”
“Did I mention it was this Penthouse Forum strategy that got you out of that dark cell?”
Baldr’s mouth opened to argue the point when he realized that his brain hadn’t quite come up with anything to counter what she had just said. After tussling with Freya, the man who previously stood guard at the door of Baldr’s cell looked like his entire face had become dislocated.
One of Baldr’s failings was that it was often difficult to get him to concede a point. For him, arguments were often more about who won than who was right. Instead of just trusting her to handle the situation, he came up with the only argument his mind could dredge up from his pool of objections.
“How do you know he’s not gay? This won’t work if the guy likes other guys.”
Freya just looked at Baldr like he had offered her a dead carp. She bent down and undid one of her shoelaces, made some final adjustments, and flipped the back of her skirt up towards Baldr as she started to walk away from him.
“Honey, nobody’s that gay. Ooopsie, my shoe’s untied.”
She gave him a, “Don’t worry, I got this” wink as she skipped off toward Thor’s holding cell and the man who was standing guard over it.
Freya stopped in front of him and feigned a stumble, like she had been tripped up by her undone shoelace. She turned her back to the guard, bent over and arched her back while fiddling with her shoe.
Behind his sunglasses the agent’s eyes were locked on Freya. She didn’t need to be able to see his pupils to know that he wasn’t looking at her feet or concerned about the state of her untied shoes. She looked up at the agent from between her legs.
“Hiya,” she said as cheerfully as she could.
“Howdy,” he said as he continued to stare.
She giggled in the most practiced and airheaded way she knew how. This required her to channel her inner Jessica Simpson and convince this guy that she had the IQ of a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. “I have something to tell you, do you want to hear it?”
“Sure,” said the agent. He was obviously the master of one-word answers.
“Just lie back and think of England,” she said.
A confused look inched across his face. Before he could offer another one-word inquiry about what that hell she meant, Freya snapped a back kick up into his chin. The impact shattered his jaw in a way that would have required a faith healer to put it right again.
Chapter 21
At first glance, it appeared that it was just his jaw that was crushed by her kick. Upon further inspection, it seemed that the force of the impact had also broken his neck. He looked like a throttled turkey on the wrong end of Thanksgiving.
Freya rifled through the dead guard’s suit and found the keys to Thor’s cell. She lifted him up by the lapels and dragged him into the chamber, his noggin doing its best impression of a bobblehead the whole way. Frisking dead CIA type agents for keys and dragging them into holding cells was becoming a habit Freya was finding annoying.
Baldr entered after her and closed the door. Freya dropped the agent’s body on the ground and turned to see Thor unconscious on the floor. He was beaten up rather badly. His hair was kinky from the Taser assault and he had large wounds in his upper chest and behind his shoulder.
The only experience Freya had in the forensic examination of a body was from one of her regulars who happened to be a police medical examiner that preferred their dates be at the places where he conducted his business. He said he was married and couldn’t take chances on being spotted at a hotel but she suspected he got a charge out of pretending the bodies were watching. On the plus side, he always paid in cash and was a big tipper. The drawback was that she spent a lot of time in police morgues. While she was far from an expert, she learned enough to know that the gaping holes were an entrance and an exit wound. She didn’t want to think that Odin, his own father, would be responsible for something that horrible, but there it was. The punctures were just big enough for a spear.
If someone was going to stab Thor, they just couldn’t have a go at him with a sharpened broom handle and expect much to happen. It took something special to pierce his hide. High impact munitions or “cop killer” bullets would do it, as would weapons from Asgard’s little corner of Yggdrasil. It didn’t take Michael Baden to surmise that it was probably Odin’s spear, Gungnir that had passed through Thor’s body. If one thing could be said about the Asgardian family ties, it would be that they were tenuous, unpredictable, and occasionally messy.
She turned him over on his back and took a few slaps at Thor’s face to see if she could get a reaction out of him. The last time Freya did this to Thor, it was for the sin of pinching her bottom while she was firmly in the grips of the moody, chocolate scarfing portion of her month. Those were fun days; days that, at the moment, seemed like an eternity ago.
Thor’s eyes fluttered. He was out of it but still alive. His eyes were a crystal blue. Freya found them beautiful in much the same way that anyone with eye for jewelry would admire a rare gem. But blue didn’t suit him. With Thor, blue was the color of apathy, boredom, the sort of passionless life that drives bored housewives to bonbons and Oprah. For the Thunder God, hiding beneath the still waters of deceptive blue eyes was fire. What most people outside of a Renaissance Festival don’t know was that Thor’s blue eyes were actually red.
Red was the color of passion in Thor. When he was worked up, the red took over his blue orbs like lava bursting from the sea. His eyes burned red when he was at his angriest or his happiest…or both. Those were times, when he was taken
with the sheer joy of destruction and chaos, that things got out of control. One time when Thor and his hammer were truly enjoying a particularly savage expression of his temper, he gave continental drift a bit of a goose and separated South America from Africa. Unfortunately, the free-floating continent ran over Atlantis while on its way to Mexico.
Freya had seen those eyes burn under a different circumstance, when the passion wasn’t for destruction and chaos but for her. In the time before doomsday prophecies and dead wives. The day she broke his heart was the first time she watched his eyes cool to a listless blue. Sif brought the fire back to his eyes, but the Thunder God did not let go of a grudge so easily. He barely acknowledged her existence after she’d walked away from him.
Freya hated seeing the now dull, blue eyes lolling around inside his head. This was not just an observation of the day, but something she noticed even on the rare occasions that she would catch his games on television. It was those same, passionless blue eyes staring out from the inside of his helmet. She knew he was depressed after losing Sif, but his unhappiness seemed to have settled into a persistent malaise. Since that time, he hadn’t looked like he could move Gilligan’s Island, let alone an entire continent.
On the plus side, once they got him someplace safe, helped him heal up, and somehow got Mjölnir back in his hands, she imagined he would become his old self. If he was anything close to the man she remembered, the vengeance he would inflict upon Odin would make the end of a Quentin Tarantino film look like a game of Chutes and Ladders.
“We’ve got to get him out of here,” Freya said she brushed the hair away from Thor’s face and stroked his forehead.
Thor was so pale. It didn’t occur to her until she got a good look at him that it was even possible for him to die. There was the prophecy that stated he would eventually be killed by the dragon, Jormungand, but she had seen no evidence that there was a large reptile anywhere in the building.
Freya couldn’t imagine what he had been through. It was obvious from his appearance that he had been electrocuted, beaten, and stabbed. If that was all it took to kill one of the Norse Gods, Kat Von D would have been dead years ago. There was something else going on here. She had no idea if Simmons was involved, but considering the fact that Odin’s lackey was about as threatening as Curly from the Three Stooges, doing Thor any great harm was probably well beyond his abilities. Yes, there was definitely something else as play.
She took a closer examination of where the spear had impaled him and found that the flesh around the wound looked like it had been chemically burned. She poked at the scorched areas. The tissue not only seemed to be burned but looked as if it had also experienced necrosis. Freya had seen this before. This sort of damage was usually found on those who had been on the wrong end of a scuffle with certain types of dragons.
Like many reptiles, dragons were venomous. The toxins dripped from glands in the gums, down grooves in the teeth, and into the wound. The venom of a dragon not only poisons the blood but can be so potent it actually scorches the flesh. This, combined with the fact that dragons weren’t obsessed with oral hygiene meant that a number of nasty germs could also have made their way into Thor’s bloodstream. Like monitor lizards and Meth addicts, food, and other substances tended to rot between their teeth. A dragon’s bite delivered a lethal brew of bacteria to the victim. The effect was not unlike a flesh-eating virus. .
It seems that Odin, in an act of extreme cruelty, had coated the tip of his spear with the cocktail of skank that dripped from the open jaws of a dragon. No one would ever accuse him of being a Father of the Year candidate, but this was beyond the pale.
“Baldr, why are you just standing there, didn’t I say that we have to get him out of here?” Freya failed to keep the frustration out of her voice.
Baldr was leaning against the wall, looking like he was doing his best impression of an impassive Marlboro man. “So? We have to get him out of here. I agree wholeheartedly. The problem is that there are a bunch of guys who look like extras from The Matrix running around here, a bevy of Valkyries masquerading as cheerleaders...oh, and a very powerful and presumably bad-intentioned Odin may be skulking around as well. Let’s not forget all the cops who think that Thor has now declared Jihad against Arizona along with the rest of western civilization. So, unless you have become the Goddess of Invisibility or have some brilliant plan in that tawny head of yours, getting an unconscious 300-pound God of Thunder out of here without getting caught is going to take more than you declaring the obvious.”
Freya hated when other people were right. She especially hated it when guys were right. They tended never to let people forget about it; probably because it happened so infrequently. While she was thinking up a retort that would address his concerns and allow her to stretch the limits of creative profanity, something he said came back to her.
“Baldr,” she said in a tone that made the light bulb over her head all but visible, “we do have a God of Invisibility here. It’s you.”
Baldr’s face went blank with confusion and he pointed to himself. If there was a dialogue bubble over his head, it would have read, “Moi?”, in response to her light bulb.
“Light is your area of expertise, right? Okay, for the most part, it’s a lame ability, but I was reading about bending light and how it can make people and objects invisible.”
“Reading?” Baldr said with a raise eyebrow and a smirk.
“Okay, okay, I saw it in the movie Predator, but it would work, right?”
Baldr had been studying light and how it reacts with the world in an effort to make his powers more potent. While most of his research involved George Lucas films, he did crack a book on occasion. He knew that objects in the real world were only visible because of the interaction between photons of light and the atoms of the object. Bending the light around an object and preventing the photon and atom from colliding would, in essence, make an object invisible. He hated her being right as much as she hated when men were right about anything.
“Hmmm...I guess it could work. Hold still for a moment.” As Baldr spoke, he silently commanded the light to flow around Freya without touching her. She disappeared.
“Well?” Freya asked.
“Honey, you’ve never looked better,” Baldr said with a grin. “Okay, so we can walk around unseen, but what then?”
Freya thought for a moment about the next step. Stealing a car probably wouldn’t be difficult, but the owner would eventually notice and call the police. They could just walk out and stroll around Glendale invisible, but carrying Thor would get cumbersome. Plus, who knew how long Baldr could sustain their invisibility cloak. Defying the laws of nature may turn out to be exactly as taxing as it sounded. While she was thinking, her mind brought her back to the guy who picked her up in Albuquerque. She remembered his smiling eyes, his weird conversation, and how endlessly entertaining she found him. She also remembered that he was going to be in the area at least overnight.
“I think I have a solution,” Freya said. “I have a friend in the area who can probably give us a lift out of here.”
“Eww…one of your clients?” Baldr made a face like he had just eaten a peanut butter cup that was filled with mayonnaise.
Freya rolled her eyes. “No, just a friend. On the plus side, he’s a friend with a really fast car. In this case, that can’t be a bad thing.” She took out her phone. She hesitated before turning it on and thought for a moment. It was an anonymous throw away phone, but she had no way of knowing if it had somehow been compromised. For all she knew, turning this phone on was as good as setting off a signal flare. She put it back in her purse.
“If we can find a phone that won’t be traced back to me, I can get us a ride very soon,” she stated.
“Well, unless you have a time machine stuffed somewhere in your Wonderbra that can take us back to the mid-nineties, I don’t think public phones are as easy to find as they used to be,” Baldr said.
“Have you got a better idea?”
>
Baldr tossed her an iPhone. “Just use that.”
Freya held it by the corner like it was a month dead koi. “Is this yours?” she said suspiciously.
“Nope, it was sitting on the bench here. If somebody is stupid enough to leave it, they deserve to have it stolen.”
Freya disliked the technology of the day. She had been stalked enough to know the ways that smitten men and aggressive creditors could keep tabs on a person’s location. Walking around with a modern smart phone was like sticking a red flashing light on your head and carrying an old school boombox with the volume set to 10.
“Okay, I’ll call him from here,” she said. “After that, we leave this and any other phone in this room, agreed?”
“Agreed,” Baldr said. He gave her a confused little shrug to convey the message that he thought she was being weird about this.
Freya called Brock, arranged for the ride, and even managed to flirt a little in the three minutes she spoke with him. She put the iPhone, along with her TracFone, down on the bench when she was done. Freya’s smile betrayed a bit more than the fact that she had secured a ride. Baldr would have to remember to make fun of her about that later…and about the little blush that rose in her cheeks when she heard Brock’s voice on the other end. Baldr picked up Thor and commanded the light to bend around them. The three deities seemed to disappear into thin air. The only hint of their presence was a tiny, wavy disruption where the light bent around them, not unlike the sight of heat rising from a toaster. Freya led them out of the room. Before following her, Baldr picked up the iPhone.
“She’s just being paranoid,” he said as he walked out of the room behind her.
Chapter 22
Being invisible turned out to be handier than either of them could have imagined, especially Freya. Never in her life had she walked past people and not felt their head turn in her direction. Being able to move about unnoticed was a liberating feeling for her. Baldr, on the other hand, hadn’t quite adjusted to the idea that being invisible only applied to being seen. He was so taken with what he had accomplished that he couldn’t help loudly explaining his opinions on the science of invisibility and all the possibilities this opened up for them.
