“He sounds… like he could be a problem,” Lia admitted.
“He invariably is, once he decides to get involved.” Loki sighed again, folding his arms across his chest. “Thankfully, that’s not as often as Thor would probably like.”
Loki aimed his gaze back out the window, focusing on the side mirror as he looked back up the coast of Malibu.
“I wonder what dear brother Thor used to coax him into getting involved this time,” he grumbled. “I don’t think I’ve done anything to annoy Tyr lately. I generally go out of my way to not annoy him.”
Sniffing, Loki shrugged, refolding his arms. “I did hear Tyr took a liking to Thor’s new wife. Perhaps she asked him to get involved. If only to appease her boor of a husband.”
Lia felt her jaw clench.
Loki still hadn’t given her that list of things each of his brothers could do, in terms of supernatural powers, but she felt like she had the gist of it.
Thor could make clouds, thunder… and, more to the point, lightning.
Tyr could fly, eccentrically collected gold, and “killed people,” whatever that meant.
“He can also read minds,” Loki said, glancing at her. “Tyr. But he must be physically close to the person. He must be able to see them, I believe. And he can only do so on some worlds, not on all of them. I can’t remember if he can do this on Earth or not…”
Loki tapped his full lips with a finger, thinking.
“…I believe he cannot do it here. But I don’t remember, honestly. I haven’t been in this world at the same time as Tyr in probably a thousand of your years.”
Lia nodded, remembering Maia enough to glance at her sister in the rearview mirror.
Seeing the blankly incredulous look on her baby sister’s face, Lia opened her mouth to say something… when a flash lit up her view in the rearview mirror, jerking her eyes to the side and behind her sister’s blond head.
A huge fireball was rising on the coast.
Lia gasped, and Maia turned her head, staring out the back window at the rising mushroom cloud.
“Ah,” Loki said, following their gazes. “I suspected Thor might not like Gregor all that much. I left him a note in that mirage about who your employer truly was. And what his ‘business’ consists of. And what his henchmen like to do to human cubs.”
When Lia glanced back at the road, then over at Loki, the god was frowning, his arms crossed even more tightly across his chest.
“Are we in trouble?” she asked him.
He looked over at her, his green eyes flat, but clearly conveying his answer.
Nodding, Lia bit her lip.
They were just coming into Santa Monica.
12
Trading In The Car
“ L eave it,” Loki urged, motioning towards Lia’s hand holding the Bugatti’s keys. “We must go. It’s likely they are tracking the car. We must put as much distance between it and us as we can.”
“The car?” Lia blinked at him. “How would they be tracking the car?”
“My brother Tyr would have questioned Gregor and his people about this. They will look for the car first, since I am doing what I can to block their efforts at tracking me.”
Pausing, Loki added,
“And Thor may not be as clever as Tyr, but he is also no fool. For months now, he has been using various cameras around the human world to try and find me… and even to track and follow the ring itself. It is part of the reason you encountered me in a part of the world where you did. Those cameras are far less common in that part of Asia. I’ve been doing my best to ‘stay off the grid,’ as you humans put it. I had hoped Thor might eventually get bored of pursuing me and go back to California to play footsie with his new wife.”
Lia frowned, glancing up at the CCTV cameras she could see even now, on the street where they currently stood, directly across from Venice Beach.
Police cameras lived at the traffic lights and at various intervals down the block, but that was only part of it. There was also the camera in the ATM machine near the bank, the security cameras at the gas station and outside the jewelry store on the west side of the street––
“Yes, yes, I know,” Loki said, impatient.
“So they’re watching us right now?” Lia said, swallowing.
“Unlikely,” the god told her. “But there is a good chance they will find us that way eventually. We have some time before they would resort to such things, versus looking for the car themselves. But we must get some distance. In addition to the problem with the cameras, the closer we brothers are to one another, the more we can feel one another––”
“Feel one another?” Lia paled, hearing the faint panic in her voice. “Can you feel them now? Right now?”
Loki nodded to her grimly.
“Yes. I can feel both of them. My brother Thor, especially. He has a tendency to… project his feelings, I guess you could say. Rather vehemently.”
When Lia glanced up at the sky, half-expecting to get struck by lightning, or perhaps hit in the head with a silver hammer, Loki motioned to her sharply, his words urgent.
“Come, little elf, come. We can still outrun them, but we must be quick.”
His words snapped her back to the present.
She knew how to run.
She’d done it plenty of times before.
Throwing her satchel’s strap over her neck and head, Lia tossed the Bugatti’s keys through the partly-opened window so that they landed on the front seat. She gripped the satchel in one hand to keep it from bouncing too hard against her hip, and took Loki’s offered hand. Speeding her walk to a near-jog to match Loki’s long steps, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure Maia followed closely behind.
Her sister walked fast, staying right behind both of them.
Even so, Maia looked dazed, like she wasn’t quite sure what was happening.
Lia wondered if the reality of having run away from Gregor was finally sinking in for her baby sister, because it was sinking in for Lia.
Had she lost her mind?
Gregor had contacts all over the world.
He wasn’t even the head honcho at the Syndicate, and all of the money she owed Gregor eventually trickled up to them. Hell, the Syndicate didn’t even operate primarily out of the United States, much less Los Angeles. Lia wasn’t sure where it was based out of exactly, but she’d always assumed somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Whatever the truth of who or what ran the highest echelons of the Syndicate, it was bigger than Lia could really fathom. Only one thing struck her as absolutely true: there was no distance far enough they could go to get away from the Syndicate and its people.
The Syndicate had operatives in probably half of the major cities of the world.
Possibly more than that.
Possibly all of them.
Even if Gregor was dead, there was a damned good chance the Syndicate would still come after her and Maia, and possibly Loki now, as well.
They might even come after them harder.
And that was in addition to all the insanity with flying gods, mystical lightning storms, and whatever else Loki was concerned about.
Glancing at Maia a second time, Lia frowned, still half-jogging beside Loki.
Come to think of it, Gregor might not be on Maia’s mind at all.
Maia might be reacting more to the conversation they’d had in the Bugatti on the way down here. Maybe she’d decided that her big sister, Lia, had gone nuts, and her big sister’s new “friend” was also batshit crazy, and likely to get both of them killed.
Lia couldn’t exactly blame her for that.
“This way,” Loki urged, pulling her down a side street.
Lia didn’t know Venice all that well. Still, she started to think she might know where they were going when Loki took them down a few more streets. That suspicion was confirmed when they rounded a last, multi-story building, and Lia saw the harbor ahead.
“Won’t they look for us on a boat?” Lia said, frownin
g, still half-running at his side as they headed for Marina del Rey. “You said Thor knew you well enough to look for you on a boat. It was the first thing you said.”
“Come, come, little elf. Better for us to get out of here now, than for us to get bogged down in details. There are boats here. We are here. We mustn’t be choosy.”
When Lia gave him a skeptical look, Loki squeezed her fingers.
“Don’t worry,” he added. “I planned ahead.”
Holding up a set of keys with a yellow flotation device attached, he jangled them.
“I don’t intend to wander around the docks, willy-nilly,” he said. “Or even to steal some poor slob’s boat and leave him stranded like we did with the car. We have a ride.”
Lia stared at the keys incredulously.
“Where on Earth did you get those?”
“I found them. At the mobster’s place. They were just sitting there… on a hook… in his study… behind a locked door. Along with a photo of the boat. And a few guns.”
Loki produced a handgun from his brown, leather coat, showing her that, as well.
Lia laughed, unable to help it.
“You are unbelievable,” she smiled, kissing his cheek.
“And resourceful,” he smiled back. “Right? Your snuggle-bunny is resourceful?”
She couldn’t exactly disagree with that.
Loki led her down to the docks, somehow getting them past a locked gate, then walking them onto the main pier. He told Lia roughly what they were looking for, and both of them scanned the boats on either side, looking for Gregor’s.
Walking down the center pier, Lia focused on one side of the dock and Loki the other. After maybe five minutes where they’d passed probably half the boats in the marina, Loki squeezed her hand, jerking his head to their right.
Without waiting, he began leading her down one of the side piers to a large yacht tied at the end.
“Is that it?” Lia said, doubtful as she squinted at the white boat. “Are you sure?”
“That is the one, precious. I saw the photo, remember?”
Nodding, Lia followed him to the end of the dock. She hesitated while Loki boarded in front of her, looking for a name on the side of the boat while the god climbed up the side and jumped down, heading immediately for the ship’s bow.
Lia found the letters on the edge then, in black paint.
“Mona Lisa Surprise,” Lia read, frowning.
Their mother was Lisa.
Lia remembered Gregor calling her his “Mona Lisa,” back when they were dating.
Grunting a little, Lia shrugged, looking away from the cursive script.
“Surprise, asshole,” she muttered, grabbing the silver guardrails and yanking herself up the ladder leading to the main deck.
When Maia grabbed the silver guardrails behind her, about to follow Lia onto the boat, Loki called down, raising his voice.
“Maia, love? Be a dear and get those, would you?”
He pointed to the ropes tying the yacht to their piece of pier.
Lia looked back from where she’d reached the ship’s deck, watching as her sister obligingly climbed back down and began untying ropes, throwing each one up once she’d pried the fitted nooses off the wooden posts.
Whatever doubts Maia might have about Loki and Lia, she seemed to shake at least some of it off as she made her way around the ship, preparing them to leave.
Lia waited for her, watching Maia untie the last rope before she walked back around the full length of the boat. Returning to the same ladder Lia used, Maia grabbed the silver guardrails and climbed up to join them, scaling the ridged metal steps rapidly and yanking herself up with her arms. Lia offered her hand when her sister got to the top, and Maia took it, letting Lia pull her the rest of the way onto the main deck.
When she reached the top, Maia hugged her.
Lia hugged her back, closing her eyes.
She hoped like hell Loki was right, that his escape plan would work.
She couldn’t bear it if someone took Maia away from her again.
Even as she thought it, Maia pulled out of the hug, grinning at her.
“Did you see the Jetskis?” she said, pointing to the stern of the ship. “AWESOME, right? There’s three of them, too, so we can all go out together!”
Before Lia could answer, her little sister turned her blond head towards Loki, who was climbing the stairs up to the cockpit at the front of the boat.
“Where are we off to now, Loki, God of Mischief?” Maia called out, a faint smirk visible at the edges of her mouth. “Somewhere exciting?”
She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, still watching Loki as he unlocked and entered the enclosed cockpit high above the main deck. When Maia began walking towards him, Lia went with her, glancing back over her shoulder at the pier, looking for anyone who might be watching them, or in the process of calling the police about a stolen yacht.
She followed Maia all the way up the stairs to the glass-enclosed compartment.
By then, Loki was already behind the round wheel, having started the boat’s engine using Gregor’s keys.
Lia looked around as the engine roared to life, noting all the gauges and screens and maps. She watched as Loki began to spin the wheel, his hand on the throttle as he eased them backwards out of the docking space.
“Well?” Maia said, as Loki spun the wheel again, and the yacht began moving forward. “Are you going to answer me? Or is that going to be some kind of weird surprise? Like you’re taking us to Atlantis? Or one of the weird places in Jason of the Argonauts?”
Loki rolled his eyes, looking at Lia.
“This girl needs a serious education, my love. She’s got her mythologies all hopelessly mixed up. I can hardly be expected to check them for accuracy when she’s off by a few thousand years in either direction… or when she has the entirely wrong part of the globe.”
Maia laughed, nudging his arm.
Something about her sister’s easy affection with Loki made Lia smile.
“Where are we going?” Maia insisted. “Tell me!”
“Why, Mexico, of course.” The god smiled at her, taking them out of the marina and aiming the ship for the open water. “Or would you prefer Hawaii?”
Lia snorted, but Maia jumped up and down, clapping her hands.
“Oooooh, Hawaii!” she said, looking at Lia. “Definitely Hawaii! Please? Can we please go there? I’ve always wanted to go!”
Loki laughed.
He glanced at Lia, giving her a wink.
“We might need to get to an airport first, love,” he said, his eyes holding a visible heat as he continued to look at Lia, even though he directed his words at Maia. “But we’ll ask big sis. See what we can do for you, yes? Asgard knows, I’m helpless in the face of her desires…”
13
Belonging
L oki taught Maia how to steer the ship.
Then, after giving her a basic tutorial on how to hold the same direction and some of the rules of operating on the open sea, he caught hold of Lia’s arm and took her with him to explore the yacht below-deck.
They walked through all of the various compartments and cabins together.
Truthfully, given how quickly Loki had absconded with the boat, Lia was just relieved they found no one sleeping down there, or one of Gregor’s goons waiting for them in one of the cabins with a loaded gun.
That being said, they did find some interesting things below deck.
Loki seemed able to sniff out contraband everywhere he went.
He found Gregor’s safe under a painting over the master cabin’s bed.
Cracking that open––using a method Lia couldn’t discern, but that definitely didn’t involve the usual safe-cracking methods she knew, or any kind of explosives––the god pulled out a few stacks of important-looking papers, some cash, and an enormous bag of what looked to Lia like cocaine, but Loki informed her was heroin.
Lia worried a bit, watching Loki heft the dru
gs in his hand, raising his eyebrows at her suggestively. Then the god laughed, presumably at whatever look he saw on Lia’s face. Before she could decide how to react, Loki opened one of the round view ports and tossed the entire bag out the window and into the Pacific.
Once it sank in what he’d done, Lia threw back her head, laughing.
“Just a little test, my dear,” the god informed her, grinning as he leaned over to kiss her on the mouth. Pulling away, he studied her eyes, his lighter green ones holding a faint scrutiny. “I’ve never been one for such substances. Truthfully, I’m not even a huge fan of spirits. Although they are handy to have around when my brothers come calling.”
Remembering the bottle of Scotch she had in her bag, and the one she’d seen Loki swig in the back of the taxi, Lia frowned, but didn’t comment. She was more than happy to donate the aged liquor to getting their butts out of here clean, if it came to that.
If she could bribe either of Loki’s brothers with the Scotch, it was definitely theirs.
Truthfully, the idea of flying gods who could wield lightning and who had a grudge with her current boyfriend––who was no picnic, granted, but hardly evil, as he pointed out––still tugged worriedly at the back of her mind.
“Boyfriend,” Loki said, grinning at her. “You just called me your boyfriend.”
“I said no such thing,” Lia informed him, giving him a mock lofty look.
“Oh, I heard it,” Loki said, tugging on her fingers. “Very clearly.”
He leaned over the king-sized bed in the master cabin, kissing her.
He kissed her harder the second time, using his tongue, his fingers curling into and clutching her long hair. When Lia remembered Maia upstairs and started to pull back, Loki smiled at her, kissing her face, then her throat.
“Don’t worry, little elf,” he murmured. “I won’t molest you in front of baby sis.”
Sliding off the thick duvet on top of the mattress, he motioned towards the three tall closets built into the wall.
“Speaking of which,” he added, walking to the first set of double doors. “You should probably find some clothes to change into, while we’re down here. No reason to put on the dirty ones from Nepal, if you can find something that fits you here.”
Gods on Earth: Complete Series (Books 1-3): Paranormal Romances with Norse Gods, Tricksters, and Fated Mates Page 27
