[Anthology] The Paranormal 13- now With a Bonus 14th Novel!

by Dima Zales

  Hoenir grunts, the door gives way, and Mimir is overcome with a minor coughing fit.

  Following him in the door, Anganboða says, “But the three of you … you’re brothers, surely … ”

  “We aren’t related,” says Loki.

  Mimir’s minor coughing fit turns to a major coughing fit. Loki looks at him sharply, wondering what’s amiss. Mimir says nothing, just turns very red.

  “Brothers,” the wolf mutters nonsensically. “She was mad … but I still loved her. And Sigyn … ” It whimpers again.

  Amy looks down at Loki. Beside her, Beatrice kneels down, too. Surely losing your children, best friends and wife warranted a little sympathy? She touches the cloth gingerly to Loki’s chin, the reek suddenly not bothering her as much. Underneath his unshaven face she begins to see that nobility again.

  “So sad,” says Beatrice with a sigh.

  Loki’s eyes flutter open. “Where am I?” he asks, rolling onto his back.

  Leaning over him, gently brushing his cheeks, Amy says, “You’re safe. You’re back with Beatrice and me.”

  Loki’s eyes go over to Beatrice and then rove down Amy’s body. He mutters something. Even though it is in a strange foreign language, it sounds heavy with gratitude.

  His eyes close again and Amy says to the wolf. “What did he just say?”

  Blinking, the wolf says, “Oh, he said ‘By the World Tree you have nice tits.’” And then it pops out of existence.

  Amy leans away, just a little bit horrified.

  Beatrice shakes her head ruefully. “Well, he’s not the god of niceness.” Standing up she says, “I’m going to bed.”

  13

  The next morning when Amy comes into the kitchen Beatrice is already there, and so is Loki. Beatrice is buzzing around the stove; Loki is sitting at the table, hunched over a cup of coffee and a half eaten plate of eggs. His hair is wet like he’s just come out of the shower, but he still hasn’t shaved. He isn’t in his armor. He’s wearing one of her grandfather’s old tee shirts and a pair of Grandpa’s utility pants that fit Loki like capris.

  He doesn’t raise his eyes when she comes in, just stares at a point on the table next to the sugar jar.

  “Hi,” Amy says.

  Loki doesn’t move or speak. But Beatrice says, “Good morning, Dear.” And then her grandmother takes a cup of tea and goes and sits down next to Loki at the table.

  Amy pours herself a cup of coffee and joins them.

  Loki doesn’t do anything, just sits hunched over, as though inhabiting his own dark world. It’s frightening, and sad.

  Swallowing, Amy says, “You told us what happened.”

  Loki’s eyes shoot up to hers. For a moment Amy thinks they are completely black, but she blinks, and they’re that eerie light gray color again.

  “You told us last night,” Amy says. Or his subconscious did. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to go into the whole wolf Fenrir thing. “I’m sorry about your family, and your friends.”

  Loki looks away.

  Beatrice shakily puts down her teacup. “I hope you won’t do anything … rash … ”

  Amy blinks. A three-day bender seems pretty rash to her.

  Loki’s eyes slide to Beatrice and then he smirks. “Are you are referring to Ragnarok, Beatrice?”

  “It had crossed my mind.” Beatrice’s eyes are steady, but her hands are shaking on her teacup.

  Amy’s heart stops. If she remembers Loki’s Wikipedia entry correctly, he’s the one who leads the dead in the battle against the Norse gods at Ragnarok, the end of the world.

  Loki snorts, and then he begins to laugh quietly. Playing idly with his fork he says, “Oh, if only I could hop aboard the ship Naglfar and lead the armies of Hel against Asgard, I would, definitely. But there are no armies in the realm of Hel. Just my daughter’s corpse, and the corpses of her maids.” His smile drops and he looks away. “There is no Hel for the meek, no Valhalla for warriors slain in battle. Those are just dreams you humans use to console yourselves during your fleeting lives. There is just nothingness.”

  “You don’t know that!” says Beatrice, fingering the cross hanging around her neck.

  Loki looks up at her and glares. And then he stands from the table and walks out the door. Beatrice and Amy watch him walk into the garage. Amy looks around the kitchen. Nothing is on fire. For some reason that makes her sad.

  Sitting with her laptop and checkbook on the kitchen table, Amy’s looking at her bank accounts trying not to feel depressed. It’s the evening after Loki’s return. She had a temp job in the afternoon, and now she’s obsessively reconciling her checkbook, calculating how much she has earned and how much she’ll need to earn to have enough money to pay the school fees her scholarship doesn’t cover, and to make a down payment on a new place to live in the fall.

  Hearing a knock at the door, Amy looks up. Through the window she sees Loki wearing the same clothes he had on earlier.

  Grateful for the distraction and relieved that he looks sober and shaven, Amy walks over and opens the door. Face almost expressionless, Loki says, “Miss Lewis, it seems I will be a guest of your world for awhile. I was wondering if … ” He looks away. “If you might help me get acclimated to your world’s current magic … technologies.”

  Amy’s stares at him. That seems so healthy and proactive. “Wow. Good for you,” she says, too shocked to move from the doorway.

  Shrugging, he says in a flat voice, “If I’m going to see Odin kneel before me while I hold his testicles in my hands as all of Asgard burns, I have to start somewhere.”

  Amy’s mouth drops.

  Straightening, Loki says, “I will make it worth your while somehow, I give you my — ”

  Amy waves a hand. “No, no, no. It’s okay … of course I’ll help you if I can; you don’t owe me anything.” She’ll just take that Odin’s testicle thing and Asgard burning thing as a slight bit of hyperbole brought on by grief.

  Loki tilts his head and his expression softens just a bit.

  Her brow furrows. “Is there any place you’d like to start?”

  Loki’s eyes go over to her laptop on the kitchen table. “Computers and the internets. The last time I was here I had some access to ENIAC — but things have come so far since then.”

  Amy blinks at him. ENIAC? Shaking her head she steps aside and motions for him to come in. “Have a seat. I’ll get us something to drink.”

  “Thank you,” says Loki, walking over and sitting in front of her computer. As she turns to the refrigerator, he’s staring at the blank screen of power save mode.

  Taking out a pitcher of freshly made peach tea, she pours two glasses and turns around. Loki has one finger hovering above the keyboard and he’s staring at her bank account information.

  “Whoa,” says Amy, going to the table and closing that tab.

  Loki looks at her, brows slightly raised.

  Wincing, Amy says, “You probably shouldn’t have seen that.”

  Loki holds up two hands. “I just touched it and — ”

  “No, no, no … it’s okay.” She grabs her checkbook and then brings the two glasses of tea over to the table. Handing him one, she takes a sip of her own. It’s not as cold as she expected. “Drats, I’ll have to get some ice,” she says.

  Holding out a hand to her, Loki says, “Sit down and allow me.”

  She hands him the glasses. He gives her a twisted half smile and frost climbs up the outside of both. “Here,” he says, handing one back.

  Amy finds herself smiling … more than she should. Is she being flirty? She shouldn’t be flirty. He just lost his family and his best friends and that would be inappropriate. She schools her face to neutral. Is it her imagination or is her pulse a little quick? Just knowing about his family … he doesn’t seem so much like an obnoxious flirt anymore. He has children, he’s —

  Loki clinks his glass with hers which snaps her back to the moment. She takes a sip. “It’s perfect,” she says, staring over her glass at h
im.

  Loki raises an eyebrow. “Where should we start?”

  Realizing she’s staring, she spins back to her computer. “Well, I guess, first … this is a mouse.” She toggles the wireless mouse she has next to her iMac. Remembering his confusion over Car, she says, “It’s just what it’s called … it’s not actually alive.”

  Loki holds out a hand and she hands it to him. Eying the mouse he murmurs, “Hoenir would have fun with this.” Expression hardening, he says, “How does it work?”

  Amy has some experience teaching techie neophytes. She expects hours of back and forth, and obvious questions that make her want to tear her hair out. That doesn’t happen.

  Loki grasps the point and click concept immediately. They move quickly from mice to the internet, and he begins asking questions that are too technical. He accidentally calls up the browser’s options and gets a menu she has never seen. He clicks on something, and when the page of gobbledygook comes up, he recognizes it immediately as the code for the page.

  That’s when she looks down and sees it. “Um … ” she says. “Loki, your fingertips are blue … ” It’s that lovely, robin’s egg shade she had seen before, and it almost seems to be alight from within.

  He looks down and his brow furrows. He takes a breath and the color fades away, like a wave draining from sand. Turning to her, his expression sharp, he says, “It is just an illusion.”

  Amy can’t help it; she puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  Turning back to the computer he says dryly, “I blame you for putting the damned idea in my head.”

  Removing her hand and taking a deep uncomfortable breath, Amy says, “Okay, maybe we should go next to Google. It’s an internet site that can tell you just about everything … .”

  Once Loki has access to Google, it quickly becomes apparent that Amy isn’t so much helping as holding Loki back. She gets up and lets him explore ‘How the Internet Works’ and ‘Static Versus Dynamic Web Pages’ by himself.

  Beatrice comes in, they all eat dinner together, and then Loki is at the computer again. When Amy goes to bed, Loki is still there, the screen flashing from one page to another. His eyes look very dark, and she swears his skin has a blue cast but decides not to say anything.

  The next day when Beatrice goes to fetch Loki for breakfast, Amy clicks on the browser’s history — just out of curiosity. She’s not sure what she expected to find, but she doesn’t expect to find a whole bunch of entries on something called Schrödinger’s cat, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, quantum computing, random number generators and something on financial derivatives. She backs slowly away.

  At breakfast when she asks him what he was browsing the night before, he just smirks and says, “Magic.”

  With the help of Google, Loki fixes the ceiling fan in her grandmother’s room — turns out the problem was actually in the fuse box. During his first week with them, among other acts of computer wizardry, Loki cleans up the hard drive on Beatrice’s PC — something Amy would have thought impossible since her grandmother seems to open every attachment and click on every link she’s ever gotten in an email. And he also manages to get a nasty virus off of nosy-neighbor Harry’s computer — Harry’s on Beatrice’s email list. Sometime that first week he also hooks up the television, the DVD player and the stereo so that all share one remote, something Amy never managed to do. After that Amy finds herself regularly watching TV with Loki late into the night. He lies on the couch, feet propped up on one end. She sits on the EZ-boy chair — she starts sleeping better there than anywhere else.

  Overall, Beatrice and Amy are both really impressed by the way Loki immerses himself in modern technology and modern life. But there are some incidents.

  Amy comes home just after lunchtime during Loki’s second week with them. She had a job as a hostess at a local restaurant that morning. Beatrice meets her in the backyard, water pot in hand. “He’s in the kitchen,” Beatrice says. “I think you need to talk to him. We just don’t do that!”

  Puzzled, Amy heads into the kitchen. Loki is wearing her grandmother’s apron … which is a little odd considering it is pink and far too small … but that isn’t what really grabs her attention.

  “Why is there a dead pig on our kitchen table?” She’s been around enough dead animals in vet school to recognize it without most of its skin and to not be disgusted — even if she is mostly vegetarian.

  Loki looks up from where he is leaning over said pig with a very big cleaver. His brows furrow. “It has come to my attention that I am, in Beatrice’s words, ‘Eating you out of house and home.’ I am trying to do my ‘fair share’.”

  “By butchering a pig … ”

  “It is a free-range pig, much higher quality than you would get in the the grocery store. Also, it is freshly slaughtered. It will be delicious … even you will want to eat this bacon.” He smacks the pig’s hindquarters and smiles.

  Tilting his chin and rubbing the back of his cheek with a bloody hand, he says, “Though tonight I think we should eat the head. I make a delicious sweetbread.” He looks at her, holding up the cleaver in a way that is kind of psycho-esque. “What?”

  “You cook?” she says. That is probably the least important question in her mind, but somehow it pops up first.

  He rolls his eyes. “Odin was always sending me out to babysit Thor when he went adventuring. Thor was a prince; a bastard, but a prince … I got to cook.”

  Amy looks at the dead animal stretched out and filling the whole kitchen table. “Where did you get the pig?”

  He blinks at her and then leans down and starts sliding the knife under the pig’s skin. “From a butcher on Fulton. I read about it on the internet and went this morning.”

  “You don’t drive … did you take this thing on the bus?” She had taught him how to use the bus and left a pass out for him. The one time Amy tried to teach Loki how to drive, he turned the Subaru into a load bearing part of the garage wall. Amy doesn’t know how he can build her a personal website on ‘server space’ she didn’t know she had and hook it up to ‘RSS feeds’ on veterinary medicine but can’t manage to put a car in reverse. It probably relates somehow to him setting the toaster on fire, though.

  He looks up at her. “You know they wouldn’t let me?” He shakes his head as though amazed. “I carried it back. I got a lot of stares. You’d think people never had seen a hog before.”

  Amy can hear the neighborhood gossip mill grinding in her head. Trying not to think about it she says, “How did you pay for it?”

  He blinks again.

  Oh, no. “Did you steal this pig?”

  “I have no money. Of course I stole the pig,” he says.

  “We don’t do that!” says Amy.

  He stares at her. Then frowning and crossing his arms, cleaver still in hand, he says, “Do you want me to return it?”

  Amy looks at the partially butchered animal and rubs her eyes. “No, just tell me where you stole it from and give me your oath that you won’t do it again.” She tells herself she’ll send the butcher compensation. Somehow. Anonymously.

  “Fine … you have my oath, while I reside at your house, I will not steal another pig — ”

  “Anything,” says Amy.

  He glowers at her.

  She glowers right back even though she feels a pang of fear. “It could attract attention and the police.”

  Narrowing his eyes, he uncrosses his arms and rolls his eyes. “Fine, you have my oath I will not steal while I reside under your roof.”

  Amy decides that is the best she is going to do. Later that night, despite her better judgment, she tries some pig cheek — it just smells so good. It is delicious.

  It is near the end of the second week when the second incident occurs. Amy is just coming home late from her hostessing job. There is a light in the living room. She follows it and finds Loki kneeling in front of the TV cabinet fiddling with the remote.

  Without thinking, she puts her hostess apron w
ith the $66.73 she got in tips from takeaway orders on the coffee table next to her laptop. It was a long day, she made hardly any money, and she has no idea how she’s going to pay all her expenses at this rate. Settling into the EZ boy, she just sighs.

  Loki flops down on the couch. “I’ve hooked the television up to your computer. We can watch YouTube, Netflix, Hulu … ”

  “Whatever,” Amy says.

  Without looking at her, Loki points the remote at the TV and some strange menu with cute icons comes up. He selects some talk on YouTube about Higgs Boson particles. Physics really isn’t Amy’s thing, but it is interesting — until it isn’t. Amy finds herself drifting off into sleep, Loki talking in the background, something about, “Humans can’t see magic, but you’ve found all these ways to look at it indirectly. I really can see why Hoenir is so fond of you … ”

  She jerks awake when the program ends. The strange menu comes up and Loki flips to Netflix and Star Trek TOS reruns.

  Spock’s making eyes at some incredibly elegant woman, and Amy’s just drifting off to sleep again when Loki says, “She’s scrawny.”

  “Mmmm … ” says Amy.

  And then out of the blue Loki says, “You know, Amy, you really are just my type, but I don’t even feel like having sex right now.”

  Amy bolts upright. Loki isn’t even looking at her. He’s just lying on the couch, head turned to the television screen. Her heart rate goes from racing back to normal. For a moment she’d felt like her sanctuary was going to collapse on her.

  Staring at the flickering light without even seeing it, Amy feels exhausted again. “Sex is overrated,” she says. Sex is a tease. Your body convinces you you want it, and then during it you hardly feel like you’re even there, your mind wanders, the sensations become muted. Once it’s over you’re left feeling incomplete, and empty, wondering why you’d bothered in the first place. And then your partner describes it as awesome. She huffs at a recent memory and stares at her fingernails on the arm of the chair.