The Trickster Edda

by Crystal Lynn Hilbert

  * * *

  Okay, so maybe this teleportation thing wasn’t so bad after all. Conrad almost had the hang of it now. He wasn’t checking to see which of his organs got left behind at any rate, so that was a considerable plus. On the downside, Loki had just frisked a security guard and emerged with a Taser, looking far, far too excited at the prospect of electrocuting someone, and Conrad just tucked himself in a corner and scribbled down a mental note to stay the hell away from Loki.

  And wow. All of this… Conrad sucked in a deep breath, taking it all in. Down on the street, perfectly normal people trotted past in their perfectly pressed suits with cell phones glued to their perfect heads. Up here, perfectly ordinary security guards loomed unobtrusively from the edges of the building, probably all trained in the perfect headshot, so good thing Loki had used the Force on them with the whole we do not exist, what is in your left pocket thing because otherwise they’d be in a mess of trouble.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the guys would take one look at them and run for the hills. Conrad would have, given the choice. Because in glowing neon green in the breaking dawn, Loki actually managed to look more like a dangerous Norse god wearing dinosaurs do it from the past T-shirt than he had when covered in runes and eight feet tall.

  The grin didn’t help matters. Neither did the fact that Hothe was standing sort of casually to one side, making tweed look like some kind of battle armor and, to be really, brutally honest, he and Lily sort of looked like the people you met on the edges of outdoor concerts, waking up lost and bewildered from their last acid trip and wondering when they’d bought tickets for this thing at all.

  Oh, and the wolf was smoking a cigar.

  Yeah.

  Conrad sniggered. He’d been awake for the past twenty four hours, his weird shit cistern was all full up and starting to splash radioactive lunacy on the carpeting. Probably, he should just stick to the Popsicle.

  “This place isn’t actually open yet,” Lily sort of suggested, more to him than anyone because they both knew Loki wouldn’t listen, but Conrad only shrugged, feeling a lot like giggling, which was probably the worst possible sign in a situation like this.

  “I don’t think it matters.”

  Abandoning the first guard as a lost cause, Loki turned and went to rifle through the next. Hothe sighed and unwrapped another candy, watching him.

  “Can’t take him anywhere,” he muttered with a whole lot of exasperation hiding a little bit of fondness.

  Conrad shrugged. He finished his Popsicle with a mournful goodbye and threw the cardboard tube into a nearby trashcan.

  “He’s your family.”

  “He’s adopted,” Hothe said, and he was kind of smiling. “Someone dropped him on his head as a child, no doubt.”

  Loki snorted, half pulling off the guard’s coat to better rifle his pockets.

  “Here I go, risking life and limb for the lot of you, and this is the thanks I get?”

  Hothe smirked. “Your daughter can’t stand you, let alone spend eternity with you. Hel would kick you out of her kingdom in a heartbeat—and, I might add, your limbs grow back.”

  “Yes, well, hardly the point, is it?” he snapped, grinned, and went back to work.

  After a minute of watching the security guard continue to, well, guard, totally unaware of the fact that his coat was mostly off and being rifled through, Lily ventured to mention the obvious. “Are we sitting ducks out here, you guys?”

  “Pretty much,” Loki grunted and then, grinning. “Found it.”

  A tendril of mist emerged from a hidden pocket somewhere on the guy’s person, lapping at Loki’s fingers. The guard frowned and shifted, resettling his coat on his shoulders with a disgruntled look around. Conrad held his breath without really realizing he wasn’t breathing—that kind of day, really—watching as the guard glared around him. But Loki’s trick with the Force held, and the guy settled for patting his pockets. Whatever he thought he’d lost was still there apparently, because he settled down, back into the land of the oblivious as the mist unraveled and coalesced in Loki’s palm as a single, ordinary key.

  “What? That’s it?” Conrad asked. “No giant gold key to the chocolate factory or something?”

  “I know,” Loki said and shrugged. “I wanted it to be a mysterious glowing rock or a trumpet or something. Odin has no sense of style.”

  And then, like it was the most normal thing in the world, he pushed the key into the center of Fenris’s latest smoke ring. The ring held and shimmered in the air. Something metallic grumbled and clicked.

  Beside him, Lily sighed. “The sixties must have been great for you.”

  “He was mortifying,” Hothe said.

  Loki grinned, looking like a wild thing. “I know. It was awesome.”

  And then, with a flourish, he turned the key. A whole sea of tumblers and booby traps clanked and clattered in the invisible inner workings of the not-door. Conrad stared at the ground, struck by the mental image of every single Indiana Jones trap happening to him all at once.

  But no, nothing happened except a door swung open where there wasn’t a door, the fabric of reality wrinkling in a way that was probably not at all healthy. And, wow, was Loki the celestial equivalent of the invisible red sock always creeping around in laundry loads of white or what?

  But no. Whatever. Conrad wasn’t going to think of that. Because he could see the inside of the stock exchange and not only was it immense, it was all of them.

  Every place along the millennia people had stopped to trade, every clearing, every meeting house, every little tavern or basement or dining room. This place held all of them, all at once—years and years contained in a single bubble of time, from forest to computers, all of it—field, shack, hovel, building, burnt, rebuilt, sordid, hidden, old and new, and everything.

  Everything.

  Someone lay on the log-desk-counter to one side, mostly naked except for the sheet thrown over him, his breathing slow and easy like he wasn’t sleeping in all the stock exchanges that had ever existed, all at once.

  Odin, Conrad thought at first, pretending to be asleep, waiting. But no. This guy still looked sort of young. Brownish stubble spattered his jaw, no gray in his hair at all, and as far as Conrad could tell, he still had both eyes. No, he knew this wasn’t Odin, just like he could feel deep down on a cellular level Loki wasn’t human.

  This was Mimir. And he was looking pretty good for a guy dead and rotting since the beginning of forever.

  Loki caught him staring and smiled.

  “Dwarves,” he said by way of answer. And then, tapping his lips with a smirk. “We go way back.”

  “You had better have a plan,” Hothe whispered.

  “Don’t I always?”

  “I hear gods taste better than dodo,” Fenris chuckled.

  And off Loki went, striding in like a big damn hero with his kid at his side. And Fenris had been normal, everyday deadly before. But as he walked, he grew, up and out until he came to Loki’s hip, and at this size, Conrad could see where his jaws didn’t fit together, the grin permanent, deep scars and broken bones, the first licks of saliva pattering to the floor.

  Reaching over, Conrad took Lily’s hand. She shot him a grateful sort of glance, giving his fingers a squeeze and, alright, they were in this together. Granted, Conrad couldn’t do magic, and he had all the dexterity of a fat puppy, so all told he was pretty useless, but at least he wasn’t in this alone.

  Behind them, the door sucked shut like water rushing into a vacuum, and the comfort of not being alone fled. Conrad could see a man standing in the clearing-hardwood-marble, watching them. He wore a suit from every era and none of them, his hair neat, beard trimmed, looking… totally ordinary.

  Behind him, a tree turned into a wall and back again.

  “Morning, Odin,” Loki called cheerfully. Like he happened to meet him out on a coffee run and hadn’t nearly been torn apart by Odin’s dog sometime in the recent past.

  Odin smiled.


  “I see you’re in one piece. More’s the pity,” he said, sounding… fond of him in an utterly terrifying sort of way. “What have you done with Mimir?”

  Loki grinned.

  “The sort of thing you can only print in magazines with fold out pictures. You know, the usual.”

  “Ah.” Odin shrugged smoothly and turned. His one eye fixed on Conrad.

  It seared, terrifying and old in a way he didn’t have the words to describe. Like being five years old and knowing there was a jealous ghost in the attic, watching, resenting him for no reason but that he existed and it didn’t. Like being disassembled for parts, being only parts, bits of a whole seen again and again until the schematic was useless and incomplete compared to memory.

  This man, this not-man, this god had torn apart cities as casually as knocking down sand castles. He’d destroyed entire species, races, clans, bloodlines. He’d slaughtered armies because they’d fight better for him dead, and when he looked at Conrad, through Conrad, Conrad could see it, all of it, the horrible knowledge spread out without emotion, without detail. Only fact.

  “Which one of the children is he in then?”

  “Oh, come on,” Loki snapped, his smile gone in a flash and he looked actually disappointed. “After all that build up—the dog, the birds, the fucking abyss—you’re not even going to fight me for him?”

  Smiling, Odin turned to regard Lily with all the knowledge of a single eye. Conrad felt her flinch beside him and, hey, no, not cool, dude. No one did that to his Lily, even if she wasn’t actually his and, okay, capable of burning down an entire apartment building if she really wanted to. And yeah, sure, she could take care of herself, but Conrad stepped in front of her just the same, because he was getting really tired of these gods and their death beams.

  Impassive as stone, Odin watched Conrad instead, considering the base parts of his base parts now that he’d gotten in the way. The expression on his face didn’t change, but long years of public schooling had left Conrad with a spider sense of when he was being laughed at.

  “The boy looks more your type, but a bit in each is more your style,” Odin mused. “Tell me, Loki. Which one are you sleeping with?”

  Loki glared, sullen and ready to fight. “Neither, as it so happens, you old twit.”

  His expression did change then—just a twitch, a flicker of amusement there and gone in the crows’ feet beside his eyes.

  “Hmm, yes. I suppose they are tidy little bookends.”

  “Cute, yeah, whatever,” Loki snapped, waving a hand in the air. “Am I gonna get my war or what?”

  “In a moment.” And then with a strange, horrible look in his eyes, “Mimir!”

  Odin’s voice rang in Conrad’s head like an echo in a certain cave beneath a mountain where he’d never been, but that he knew, knew in his blood, in his bones. For a horrible, suspended moment, Conrad smelled copper and acid, the stench of rotting fish and seaweed and old marrow bones. He smelled snake skin, leathery but molding from the damp. He heard weeping. A woman. Cursing. He felt fingers playing on the wrong side of his belly button, trailing through his innards like his fingers through Lily’s hair, and it didn’t hurt, but it sure as hell felt weird.

  I’m not nearly that easy, you sorry sack of entrails, Mimir chuckled in his head, and suddenly the feeling was gone, leaving Conrad kind of queasy and wondering just when this family reunion from hell would swallow him.

  For his part, Loki looked immensely pleased with himself. He turned and, catching Conrad’s eyes, glanced at the body, then at Conrad and winked.

  Oh.

  Oh shit. No.

  Conrad knew what he wanted, sure. He also knew there was a whole lot of shit and a truckload of industrial strength fans involved. But at this point, Loki knew him well enough to take the look of nausea on his face for understanding and grinned, turning back to Odin.

  “Well, that was a spectacular failure,” he announced, grinning. “You know, I didn’t believe Hod when he said you were getting older, but you really are. Maybe you need new batteries.”

  Odin pursed his lips. “Possibly I need a new family,” he grumbled.

  Behind his glasses, Hothe’s eyes flashed in a way entirely too reminiscent of his father’s. He grabbed the opportunity to take that as an insult and strode forward, putting himself between Odin and Conrad.

  “If it were that easy, I’d have beaten you to it long ago,” he snapped, peevish.

  “Come on,” Conrad whispered into Lily’s ear at the same time Odin said, “Ah, so that’s where you buried yourself, Hod. What are you now? Some sort of human academic?”

  Fingers locked, Conrad and Lily crept around his blind side while the others ran distraction. Avoiding the empty eye socket, they scurried away in a crouch, ducking behind the log-table-counter that held Mimir’s body.

  Not really knowing what else to do, Conrad sprayed it with Miracle-Gro.

  Nothing happened.

  “Well, shit,” he muttered.

  “What do we do now?” Lily whispered.

  “I don’t know. Try to get Mimir back in there?”

  On the other side of the counter, Fenris drawled something about chicken and gods and how they tasted good together. Even Conrad could feel the potential for sudden, magical death crackling in the air. Though, granted, he’d been getting some serious practice lately.

  Lily squeezed his hand again, lips pursed so tight he could see where the blood left and the color from her Popsicle began.

  “Is he…?”

  Closing his eyes, Conrad groped around in his head, trying to feel anything unusual but feeling infuriatingly like himself, with his eyes shut, thinking about nothing while the world fell to bits around them.

  Mimir, he thought pointedly. And when that didn’t work, repeated it again and again.

  Nothing.

  “I’m starting to think the best place for you really would be tied up in eternal torment under a mountain,” Odin said, voice just as even as always but decidedly less charmed by Loki’s stunning personality.

  “I can’t find him,” Conrad hissed, far too close to panic for comfort. “I can feel him—I mean, I know he’s still in there—but I can’t get to him.”

  Lily looked sort of sick. “Want me to zap you?”

  On the other side of the barrier, Loki laughed.

  “Sounds kinky,” he purred at Odin. “But you know you’d miss me.”

  Conrad flinched. They were running out of time. “Do it.”

  Leaning in, Lily poked him in the forehead. A brain freeze flared up through his cranium and Conrad knew the others were talking, but he could only hear a roaring in his ears that might have come from being zapped or might have been the pressure of undiffused magic in the air. Head full of panicked, wooly cotton, he could almost hear distant, pissy British muttering.

  “Miss the trouble you cause?” Odin’s voice broke through the haze, clear and dangerous.

  “Did it work?” Lily asked, a hand on his wrist.

  Did it work? Did it? What was it even supposed to do? Conrad didn’t know if anything had changed, except his head kind of hurt now and he could almost hear Mimir bitching about unappreciative brats, which kind of sounded like him, except the whole incoming instant death thing was really making the first rule of the Hitchhiker’s Guide kind of hard to follow. Except it was all Conrad could think of—don’t panic, don’t panic—and suddenly Hothe was right next to the table, the edge of the counter gouging into his hip, the root clump dangling over his shoulder. He had a big-ass shield up in front of him, a snarl curling at his lips, and judging by the look on his face, things were Not Going Well.

  “Is he listening?” he asked without taking his attention from his father and, wow, he was kind of desperate, which just made the don’t panic thing a hell of a lot harder.

  “The trouble I get you out of?” Loki laughed. Conrad didn’t need to see him to hear the grin in his voice. “For no more reason than the kindness of my heart, I might add?”r />
  “He’s ignoring us,” Conrad hissed and sucked in a deep breath, trying to think of Popsicles and Lily and not dying.

  Out in the clearing-hardwood-marble, Odin smiled, his staff in his hand, and Conrad could see that, though he was pretty sure he hadn’t been carrying a staff when he came in. From a few of the older sets of speakers in several different once-realities, fifties music crackled sweetly, cracked and pitted, into life.

  Lily swallowed and braved a peek over Mimir’s chest.

  “Not good,” she managed.

  “Alright then,” Odin drawled. “I’ll leave your heart intact.”

  “Get down!” Hothe hissed, just as his father turned to smile at them, not a gray hair out of place. And Conrad could see Loki’s shields blazing around him through the root clump, fire licking patterns down his arms like he was the tastiest thing ever. Fenris bristled and grinned, spittle streaming down bear-trap jaws that could never close, and he was growing, still growing, laughing in a way that didn’t promise a full bag of marbles.

  “Can’t hurt me, old man,” Fenris said from his father’s side. “Seer says I’m fireproof.”

  “Well, we’ll have to test that, won’t we?” Odin chuckled. “But first—” and turning, a spell shattered from his fingers, a blast of messy, prolonged death searing into Hothe’s shield.

  Hothe grunted, hit the ground hard on his knees when his legs buckled, face twisted up in pain. But he held the shield, still upright.

  And Odin actually looked pleased.

  “You’ve gotten better,” he said, sounding proud, which, okay. Conrad knew the gods were all pretty screwed up, but oh look, I couldn’t kill you, I’m so proud was a strange, new low.

  “He learned from me,” Loki snarled and grinned, shape rippling. “Stop picking on the kiddies and hit me, dammit.”

  Odin turned to look at him, half-laughing. “Hit you? Or the dozen killing charms you have in your pocket?” he chuckled. “I know you too well, Loki. You cheat.”

  “I may do. Never stopped you before.”

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s great,” Fenris cut in, weaving past his father and out into the battlefield-clearing-hallway. “Swagger, swagger, sniff, sniff. Get on with it.”

  Loki shrugged. “Sure,” he drawled. “Why not?”

  And half the world exploded.

  Conrad hit the ground, eyes squeezed shut, head covered, wracking his brain for any sign of British distain. But there was nothing. Nothing he could hear over this roar at any rate. And when he cracked his eyes open again, he found death beams whistling overhead, careening in and out of reality, knife-sharp shapes battering against their barricade. For every attack that hit Loki, Conrad watched three more shatter against Hothe’s shield like grenades, tearing up earth and tile wherever they hit, and Conrad saw him sweating with the force of holding the protection up, trembling, about to shatter himself.

  “Get down, you idiot!” Conrad shouted.

  “You honestly believe a tree alone is going to protect you?” Hothe snarled back, hair falling into eyes that were losing their humanity. “Get the body and get Mimir.”

  Lily stood, crouching behind her own shield and, half draped across the tree-table-counter, pressed a hand to Hothe’s back.

  “You can’t hold it yourself,” she ground out, forcing her shield around. Conrad watched it blend into the one Hothe held, shimmering with a rainbow of unnamable colors as yet more instant death flew screaming their way.

  As good a time as any, he figured and popped up like a demented gopher in a bombing run. Hoping to whoever would listen the shields held, Conrad grabbed the corpse’s arm and pulled.

  Nothing happened.

  Well, shit. He wasn’t exactly Hercules here, but you’d think he’d be able to budge the thing. Conrad tried again, shoving with all his weight behind it. Beside him, Lily swallowed a scream and nearly pitched off the table, a particularly nasty bolt sending energy slicing down her arms. Conrad could feel her shaking next to him, could hear her teeth rattling, and he had to do this.

  Fueled by desperation, fear, and something approaching rage, Conrad wrenched at the corpse. He put all his weight against it, all his metal energy—wrenched the corpse with all the strength he had, and it still didn’t budge. Mimir’s body stayed stuck fast to the tree like it was the tree.

  Through the maddening swell, Odin’s staff knocked once against the ground. Conrad watched, horrified as Loki sailed backward into a hill-cliff-wall. Mouth bleeding freely, he landed in a cloud of debris, bounced with a sickening crack, tumbled into the rubble like a ragdoll, and did not move.

  Everything went silent.

  Fenris froze, torn between ripping Odin apart and running to Loki.

  After a long moment, he went to his father.

  Lily sank down beside Conrad, looking battered and broken.

  “Mimir?” she mouthed.

  Conrad couldn’t speak. He settled for a gesture. In the movies, events like this called for small, smug gestures like very dramatic chin tilting or smirking. Gestures that said, oh, everything is under control there, miss. I’m just waiting for the soundtrack to get to the really loud, dramatic bit before I saunter out. Not worries whatsoever, please.

  Conrad’s gesture wasn’t that sort of gesture. Conrad’s gesture was more of a flail that managed to convey Mimir’s off taking the metaphorical piss I cannot move his body my history professor is going to die and we will be impaled on the explosion of ribs and femurs and die also I don’t know what to do this was not on the loan application when the hell did I sign up for this all in one neat, hysterical package.

  In the clearing-hardwood-marble, Odin straightened his suit, brushing a bit of dust off of his shoulder. He turned and smiled at Conrad like the grandfather he never knew he had and funny how he managed to look more normal than Conrad’s real grandfather doing it.

  “I have wanted to do that for centuries, you have no idea how much,” he announced amicably.

  Conrad glanced at Loki, waiting for him to get up.

  He looked dead.

  For a long moment, thought stopped. Conrad felt empty. Loki looked dead.

  Don’t panic, whispered the soundtrack in his head.

  Fenris nosed Loki’s body, muttering something—muttering, okay, and maybe it was a spell or something because he wasn’t whimpering, not Fenris, nothing to worry about, don’t panic, don’t panic, he just looked dead.

  He looked dead.

  “So you must be Conrad. Nice to finally meet you,” Odin said, smiling. “I believe you have something of mine?”

  Eat shit, Conrad wanted to say. He didn’t think he’d live long enough to finish saying it, but he didn’t know what else to do. Risking a glance at Hothe for help, he found the man didn’t look human anymore.

  “Fuck you,” Hothe growled and, wow, hey, eat shit would have been a totally appropriate thing to say. Great. He’d remember it for next time.

  Except Conrad suspected Hothe had only said it to take the attention back onto himself and away from the poor, defenseless humans, because he shoved Lily back behind the table and stood, hardly showing how much of a struggle it was, but Conrad could see he hurt in every place there was to hurt.

  Odin, for his part, sighed.

  “Hod. Throwing your lot in with Loki, I see. I’m disappointed in you.”

  “Yes. Imagine that. Loyalty. What a novel concept.”

  Odin arched an eyebrow at Hothe, and Conrad could have happily lived the rest of his life not knowing that was a family trait.

  “Loyalty? Really?” he asked and that was it. That was all he said, but Baldr’s name hung unspoken in the air between them, and Hothe ground his teeth, magic gnashing around his arms.

  “I had a reason, dammit,” he snarled. “What’s your reason? Hiding from Ragnarok? Allow me to be the first to say there is no wall you can build—no geas-bound army of human souls—that can ever save any of us.”

  Ducked beneath the counter-table-tree, Lily crawled over besi
de him. Together, they pulled at Mimir, but even between the two of them they couldn’t move him. Not even his arm moved.

  “Fudge,” Lily hissed and ,okay, Conrad had to appreciate a woman who wouldn’t say fuck, even in the face of the apocalypse. “Happily Ever After.”

  He could overlook the fact she was crazy.

  The fifties music crackling from the speakers interrupted his desperate happy thoughts, static louder, the sound of it distant, echoing down a rusty tin pipe to get to them. Even as he listened, the words started to change, half-forgotten, different language.

  Odin didn’t look nearly so impressed with his kid anymore.

  “You’re a god. Not much of one, granted, but a god nonetheless. Start acting like it.”

  Tiny nightmares spilled from Hothe’s eyes. “We are not immune to death.”

  “Happily ever after?” Conrad hissed. “If being stuck to a damn log is your idea of happy—”

  “It’s a spell,” she snapped, prodding the body while sparks slipped from beneath her fingernails. “In fairy tales, when there’s some girl stuck in one place, asleep for the rest of forever until terms are met—it’s a Happily Ever After.”

  Conrad felt sick. “Should we kiss him then?”

  Even despite the death threats in the air around them, Lily managed to shoot him the you are an idiot why do I like you? look.

  “Tell me, Hod,” Odin purred, too close for comfort. “When was the last time you took apples from Idunn?”

  Conrad glanced up to find Hothe looked as sick as he felt.

  “You can’t keep doing this,” he ground out, sounding disgusted, but there was something warped about it. Conrad couldn’t tell if he was sick with himself or his father.

  “Keep doing what, precisely? Reclaiming what this cretin steals from me? No, you’re right. And I have no intention of doing so.”

  “Well, it must suck to be you then. This cretin has no intention of stopping,” Loki mumbled, somewhat incoherently, pulling himself up from the rubble with a hand on Fenris’s shoulder, wiping the blood from his chin with the back of an already filthy sleeve.

  Odin turned to watch him, deadpan. “Oh. I didn’t kill you, I see. A pity.”

  Lily managed somehow to look relieved, angry, and terrified in the same second.

  “We just need to meet the terms,” she whispered, like that was easy as pie and they’d be done in time for lunch.

  “Alright.” Conrad swallowed and tried to look as Zen as she. “What are the terms?”

  “I don’t know. It feels like Loki’s magic, but it’s not. It’s… it’s warped somehow.”

  “Well, can we unwarp it?”

  Lily looked at him like someone had crucified her puppy. “I can’t.”

  “Always was hard to kill. You know that,” Loki sniggered. His mouthful of broken teeth healed, shifting back the way they’d been, bloody but whole. The leg that had been bent at ragdoll angles straightened. He stopped limping and stood without Fenris’s help, long fingers of his left hand trailing through the bloody fur. “Feel better now, Grimnir? You think now that you’ve got that out of your system we can talk like members of the modern age?”

  Odin smiled, looking at Loki like he kind of liked him after all but really wanted to see him devoured by something acidic anyway.

  “Pillage and burn was always so much easier though.”

  Casually, with a twist of the fingers, Odin cast another spell. Fire, feeding on itself, grew as it screamed toward them, and Conrad knew. He could feel it in his blood, in his bones, in whatever part of him he got from Loki once upon a time—and Fenris ran, but Conrad knew he couldn’t run fast enough to block the spell, asbestos fur or no, and a tree-sometimes barrier wasn’t going to stop it. It’d hit Lily or Hothe—too close to see which, no time to see which—and both were in too much pain to get a shield up fast enough.

  Conrad didn’t have time to shout or think, only enough time to vault up and over the tree-table-counter and into its way.

  He heard his name, something that sounded like you idiot and oh god and a rather disappointed fuck for good measure, and then he couldn’t hear much of anything except fire and light roaring in his ears, blinding him, pressing him down, and choking, and he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe—

  Except he was breathing. He was breathing fine. Nothing in the world wrong with him.

  Conrad straightened, glared at the fire, and watched as it abruptly went out, leaving his skin itchy and pink.

  “A sunburn?” he asked, feeling like a hero, like an idiot, and a whole lot like he was about to faint. “Hey, great and powerful wizard, I come all the way to Oz and all you give me is a sunburn?”

  The roar set up shop in his ears again, aching and stretching inside his too small skull.

  “What in the hell were you thinking, that was so stupid, argh,” he heard Hothe cursing, right next to him—when had he gotten so close?

  And what was going on? His ears rang like a whole goddamned church had crawled inside his head to die and, wow, he really hoped this wasn’t the pry your head open like a clam part of the morning, but his head hurt, and he was pretty sure Hothe was the only thing holding him upright because he couldn’t feel his legs at all, only the vortex where his head had been.

  “Ow, shit, ow,” he groaned. “Make him stop. I’ll just give him Mimir, alright. Jesus god, he can take him, ow, just cut it out.”

  Lily ran a hand through his hair, whispering nonsense—almost positively nonsense—maybe some sort of spell or something because he thought he could feel her sunshine prickling at his skin, but maybe not because Hothe was shouting—bellowing at his father, and that didn’t make much sense either.

  His vision swam and spun, twisting him around and inside out in time to the throbbing of his head, and when Conrad could make any sort of sense of his surroundings, hey, guess what, he was on the ground. When that had happened, he had absolutely no idea. Was he even on the ground?

  But he could see Hothe from where he lay, not looking like himself at all. Or maybe he looked too much like himself, because his glasses were off—clenched in Lily’s hand—and horrible, horrible things flashed in his eyes as he stormed across the room, staring his father down and, even woozy, Conrad could see the imprint of a millennium in his stance and shoulders.

  “I haven’t done a thing, actually,” Odin announced, sounding offended and, what, really? “Spell came back muttering about Miracle-Gro.”

  And apparently Hothe had just become the trouble because Loki was trying to talk him down when, hey, wasn’t Odin the big problem? But Odin had his shields up, smiling and goading, saying, “How is it you’re so desperate to protect a random human when you can kill your own kin in cold blood?”

  Hothe stilled. The room went icy cold and the wind died. As the branches of the sometimes trees stopping moving, the body breathing easy on the counter took on a pallid blue hue. Suddenly there was something else in the room. Something bigger and older and terrifying. Conrad couldn’t see it, but Odin could, and Loki could.

  Loki looked perturbed, somewhere between irritated and worried, and he turned, just enough from where he’d been holding Hothe back, and Conrad saw it.

  The creature wasn’t tangible. It ate stray limbs fallen over the edge of the bed at night. It lived in the closet, in the attics and alleys, sewers and shadows and the back of his mind. It was fear and loss and all the things that happened in dark spaces.

  It was hungry.

  “Put your nightmare away, boy,” Odin growled.

  “Stand down,” Hothe growled in two voices. “Or I’ll bury you with Baldr.”

  It was Hod.

  “Conrad, you have to concentrate,” Lily whispered in his ear. “You’re being possessed. I didn’t catch it soon enough. You’re going to have to throw that asshole out yourself.”

  “What?” he asked, or tried to, but his mouth wasn’t really working.

  And, wow, his head throbbed like something was clawing its w
ay out and oh shit what if something was? A pretty mental image to die with. He could just see it now—him, languishing in Lily’s really very nice lap, having a dramatic, prolonged death throe, and then some kind of alien busting out of his cranium, screeching for whatever aliens screech for and, hey, he couldn’t feel his arms.

  Or rather he could, but they weren’t his.

  And where had the pain gone?

  Oh. Right. Possession. Well, shit.

  Conrad stood up and glared at Odin. This was probably the very last thing in the world Conrad wanted to be doing. Both the upright thing and the glaring at the god trying to kill him thing seemed to be spectacularly bad ideas.

  “If you could both stop flexing long enough to form a coherent thought, I would greatly appreciate it,” Mimir drawled, and it was Conrad’s body and Conrad’s mouth, but thank god it wasn’t his vocal chords because, hey, guy in Conrad’s head? There was only one thing standing between Odin and Mimir, and that one thing was Conrad’s very fragile and decidedly breakable body. So hey, why not give being polite and friendly a try? Didn’t that sound great?

  “Conrad, you idiot,” Lily muttered.

  Conrad tried to look at her, but his head wouldn’t turn. So he looked for something else he could do to signal he was alright. Finding his right arm unoccupied, Conrad seized on the chance. Except apparently Mimir had changed the locks while he was out and now all the controls were different, so all he managed to do was flail one arm like a really pissed off fish.

  Behind him, Lily started to giggle in a slightly hysterical way. Mimir ignored him, continuing to stare at Hod and Odin in a threatening and unimpressed type manner, thoroughly ruined when Conrad somehow managed to wedge his arm down the front of his own shirt and couldn’t get it back out.

  Yeah, well. Welcome to his existence, old dude. Conrad couldn’t do threatening and unimpressed, even when a god was doing it for him.

  Loki looked like he was trying very hard not to smirk. Conrad concentrated equally hard and gave him the finger.

  Mimir took the arm back.

  How you have managed to survive this long in the world is a mystery to me, he thought at Conrad, being rather ungrateful for a body hijacker.

  My fly’s undone, Conrad thought back.

  He found the brief jolt of argh immensely satisfying. Until he saw Hod fixing the full force of his nightmare stare on Mimir now and if he hadn’t known Hothe so well, the shadow-history professor overlap would have him screaming in his sleep for years.

  “Let him go,” Hothe growled in two voices.

  “I would love to. Believe me, I never want to exist this close to puberty again. But as I have informed the children already, I am incapable of self-locomotion at the present time. So kindly bugger off.”

  “Yes, well, self-locomotion is no problem at all,” Loki grinned and swaggered forward, looking charming and entirely unlike he had almost just died. “Gimme a minute to pop you back into your head and we’ll be golden.”

  “No,” Odin said, and Conrad could hear the copper and acid in his voice again. “Let’s not.”

  The old god didn’t move. No spell, no nothing, not even a twitch of the mouth. But in the mist between the trees, a dog shape appeared, growling. It filled the middle spaces, real in every year that played between the trees and technology, filling out from puppy to giant hound and back again, eight different breeds crammed into a single skin, all of them trying to devour each other at the same time and, okay, seeing him, the fire engine bark made sense.

  “What, again? Really?” Loki snapped, glaring and utterly unimpressed. “Is there a hole in the bottom of your bag of tricks or something?”

  Odin turned to glare at him, looking kind of like he wanted someone’s head to explode and wasn’t sure whose. Loki snorted, made a face right back, and crossed the room anyway. Snarling, Garm lunged from the trees, but Fenris met him halfway, bigger and twice as mean, all shining teeth and snapping jaws. Garm howled like a banshee giving birth, but Fenris swore louder than the howls, creative enough to put an alcoholic veteran to shame, in between gashing blows of teeth.

  “Clever trick with my birds, by the way,” Odin announced, sounding less like he thought it was clever and more as though he wanted someone to die, messily and at length. “I mean to pay you back for it in kind.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Loki swore. “Grow up.”

  Glowering, he strode right through what was about to be a dogfight and Odin only watched him, amused and angry with one eyebrow cocked, but apparently magical shields protected against magical attacks, not pissed off giants. Because Loki shifted, large and Jotun, and Conrad could see the runes all down the fist he slammed through the ward and into Odin’s one good eye.

  Hothe grinned, nastily, two people at the moment and both of them looking like they’d happily get really violent. In a second he’d crossed the room, flying, walking, running, loping, all of it at once, all of the creatures Conrad had ever believed would get him while he slept.

  “You bloody-minded simple idiots,” Mimir snarled. “Act like Aesir.”

  Odin didn’t change sizes, but his hand flashed out and caught Loki by the throat. The grip didn’t last long. They rampaged off in a blur, a series of blows exchanged faster than Conrad could follow, before Loki reeled away, breathing hard and grinning.

  “Just like old times,” he panted.

  Odin rolled his eye. “Do shut up.”

  “What, now? You call that foreplay? We haven’t even gotten started.”

  Across the room, Fenris’s patience broke and he barreled into Garm, sending a furry ball of death careening through the field-foyer. Half of Hothe swelled up, huge with a round mouth full of teeth. He lunged at his father, laughing like funeral bells as Loki joined in next to him and together they spun and swelled like a star about to die.

  Conrad watched them tear up the place without a care in the world. Let them go. Let them have the world.

  But then, he stood and watched as they came too close to Lily. Lily, who could barely get a shield up she was so damn exhausted, and exhausted because of this pack of assholes. He watched a handful of careless spells almost kill them both and, oh yeah.

  Conrad was pissed.

  Pressure built in the back of his head, seeping out from behind his eyes, but no, nothing to worry about, just something totally unnatural oozing out of his skin. It felt like Lily’s sunlight but sharper, hotter, with the tang of Loki’s chaos, something like electricity and falling, and it was his.

  Just like his body, thanks very much, and he’d be taking that back now.

  Conrad seized on the feeling, on the growing, burning possibility, and pushed. Something snapped into place and suddenly his arms were his again, locks all the way they were, controls in order.

  “Not now, you idiot,” Mimir hissed inside his head, sounding bewildered and half-panicked, and welcome to the goddamned club, you son of a bitch, that’s what possession felt like.

  And hey, while he still knew which way went up on this ray gun, this little tiff had gone on long enough. Conrad let the feeling swell, let it wash over him, feeling the void, the scattered starlight on his skin, and it burned. It burned and itched and prickled on the inside of his skin, pressure building behind his eyes, shining through his eyes, and it was too damn easy to pull the trigger.

  Conrad wasn’t trained. He wasn’t powerful. He only had a little bit of chaos from whatever ancestor it was that screwed Loki in the first place. But he was desperate and pissed, and he didn’t know what was possible and what wasn’t, but apparently his magic didn’t think it polite to inform him he couldn’t do what he was doing and just went and did it anyway.

  A ball of hot death leaped from his fingers and shattered into the tangle of gods. Hothe dissipated. Just blinked out of existence for a second and reappeared on the other side of the room, human again, next to Lily. Loki and Odin jumped apart like cats doused in cold water, both turning to look at him. Loki’s eyes burned black, hair tousl
ed and wild as his sharp-toothed grin. Where Conrad’s magic rested on his skin, it burned, lit up with a color Conrad didn’t have a name for, and Loki looked like he’d just licked a light socket and was ecstatic to have done so.

  Hothe looked mortified. He pushed his hair back into place, took his glasses from Lily and readjusted them on his face. Odin glowered, his suit rippling. Possibly, it wasn’t the fabric’s fault.

  “Child’s chaos, Mimir?” he spat and was very much less man-shaped than he’d been a moment ago.

  Conrad stared him down, chest heaving and furious as hell.

  “Mimir,” he growled. “Stepped out.”

  “Yes, hello, remember us?” Lily snarled and pushed herself upright to stand above Mimir’s body. Her hand was glowing, pressed to the center of his chest, and judging by the sear starting on the sheet, Happily Ever After meant Lily got to be the Wicked Witch. “Yeah, well, this complete and total idiocy stops now.”

  Suddenly Odin was very human and grandfatherly again. He whistled from the side of his mouth with a sort of apologetic look, watching as Garm broke away from Fenris to scamper, bleeding, back into the mist.

  Arms crossed, Loki watched her, halfway between the body and Odin.

  “Problem, sweetheart?” he asked, amused.

  “I don’t know how you solved problems where you come from, but hey, guess what?” she snapped, glaring between the two of them. “Obviously, it doesn’t work.”

  Odin chuckled. He hadn’t seen Lily in action. Also, he’d obviously been away from home awhile now, as somehow a woman so far past rage she’d reached Annoyance of the Black Hole Variety—as in, you enter, but you sure as hell don’t come out—wasn’t something he knew to fear.

  “Girl child,” he started, and Lily fixed him with a look. Her hand flared.

  Doing the smart thing, Odin stopped talking, but he smiled, wheedling, and inched a little closer.

  Conrad didn’t care what he was going to do. He didn’t care if he was about to recreate the world with sunshine, rainbows, and sparkly unicorns. His magic blazed up and out, reaching for anything close enough to consume, and he wasn’t in control. He didn’t even look in control. He had sparks shooting out of him and onto the grass-wood-marble, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure his clothes weren’t smoking, but one thing he did look?

  Dangerous.

  Odin reconsidered.

  “You’ve got a spark in you, girl. Reminds me of Thor’s mother,” he said, perfectly charming, though now at a safe distance. “Would you happen to be in the market for divinity?”

  Lily smiled. It was not the sort of smile Conrad ever wanted fixed on him, ever. “You are the one who got us into this mess. If you’d like to hand over your soul and an apology, I think we can do business. Otherwise…”

  Loki grinned. “That’s my girl.”

  Conrad turned and glared at him, bits of horrible, violent possibility swimming in the air around him, wrenching like large, eager dogs on impossibly tiny leashes.

  “Now is not the time to be a dick, Loki. I am two seconds away from blasting Mimir into the stratosphere,” he said and smiled a horrible, twisted smile that would only pass for humor in present company. “Bet you I can do it.”

  Inexplicably at Lily’s side, Fenris sniggered.

  “How many dodos?”

  “Don’t goad them, you idiot,” Odin snapped and started forward, thinking better of it when Lily’s hand got brighter and Hothe’s nightmare slipped.

  “Save your orders for the Einherjar,” Hothe snarled, and Conrad had absolutely no idea what that meant, but he was pretty sure it was the old Norse equivalent of save the drama for your mama—and when had Hothe gotten to Lily’s side, anyway?

  “If they damage Mimir—” Odin started.

  Loki snorted. “Aw, shut up. She’s got nothing on Angrboda in a pisser.”

  “Damage, hell,” Conrad broke in. “I, for one, am going to disassemble Mimir.”

  “And I would just like to note the sudden concern from the man who slaughtered me,” Mimir interjected.

  “You know,” Lily drawled pleasantly, so close to conversational that all eyes flew to her in a hurry. “I happened upon a spell once that supposedly summons Frigg. Now, I’m clever enough to know it’s only going to catch her attention for a few moments, but I do wonder just what she’d think of this.”

  Lily looked at Odin, smiling.

  “You are acting like children. If you don’t whip ‘em out, measure, and call it a day already, I am going to do something you will all immensely regret.”

  Loki sniggered. “I’d win.”

  You’d cheat, shape shifter, Conrad wanted to say, but Lily made a sound that wasn’t a word but nevertheless described exactly which of their wives she would bring down in a frothing Valkyrie rage if her expectations weren’t met within the next three seconds, and Loki thought better of it.

  Odin sized her up, managing to look both shifty and angry.

  “There is no such spell. Put your night light out, girl, before I do something you will immensely regret.”

  But Lily only blinked at him, and Conrad wondered kind of distantly if she had someone in her head too because this looked a hell of a lot like suicide.

  “Would you like to hear about my day, Mr. Wednesday? My day involved almost having my eyes pecked out by giant crows, fleeing for my life through the Middle Ground, and bargaining with the Fates,” she said, staring him down. “This little song and dance of yours does not impress me.

  “I am tired, I am pissed off, and I want to go home without worrying your lack of socially appropriate communication skills will follow me back in a violent and disfiguring way. So either I summon your wife—who, I suspect, will be about as pleased with all of this as I am—or you learn to talk about your feelings,” she said, and then, throwing down the next three words like a gauntlet: “Take. Your. Pick.”

  Well, Conrad decided, this day had gone about as far downhill as it could without someone maimed or dying. Maybe it was time to get this Popsicle stand on the road.

  “Loki, how do I get Mimir back into his body?”

  “You don’t,” Odin cut in, a dangerous look in his eyes.

  “Eat shit,” Conrad snarled back, giving into temptation. “I am done with this game, you son of a bitch. Done. I’m not going to be some prancing happy chosen one. I’m not going to be possessed or—or a chalice for some smarmy, unappreciative old bastard. And when I get home, my apartment better be pristine or I am going to track you down with a celestial bazooka and spread your ashes from one side of the globe to another. Fucking see you at Ragnarok, you ass.”

  Odin blinked at him, both infuriated and taken aback that a human would dare threaten his life, and Conrad had a brief moment of oh shit, here we go before Lily cut in.

  “And while we’re on the subject,” she snapped, “would someone like to tell me what on this earth could you possibly need to lock someone in your well for two thousand years for? On what warped reality does that seem okay to you?”

  Hothe chuckled, darkly. He looked human, but obviously he hadn’t sorted out his innards yet because he sounded like broken glass gargling tortured souls of the damned.

  “He’s afraid Mimir will leave him if he gives him the choice.”

  Odin turned and spat something in a language that, judging by its resemblance to a seesaw hacking up gravel, was probably Old Norse. Going by how pissed he was, Hothe was probably also exactly right.

  “Really? That’s what this has been about?” Mimir asked, projecting through Conrad’s mouth while he was too distracted to stop him. “You idiot.”

  Odin turned to glare at Conrad, which, not cool, Mimir. But glaring back at Odin put Loki in his line of sight. Loki who, making a pointed gesture, slipped down into a rat and scurried off toward Lily.

  Okay. Distraction duty. After all this, he could sure as hell distract.

  Possibly, the only thing he could do and do well.

  “What did he even do tha
t you stuck him in a well in the first place?” Conrad pressed, smirking in a way that always pissed him off when other people did it. “I mean, really?”

  “He betrayed me,” Odin threw back. “He’ll do it again no sooner than his fingers are his own again, the lying bastard.”

  “Well, the way I hear it, you’re not exactly sunshine and rainbows yourself.”

  “I was leaving,” Mimir broke finally, exasperated. “Such a betrayal, I know, that someone would dare wish to be parted from the pleasure of your company for half a second of privacy.”

  “The Vanir, Mimir?”

  “Oh, by the Tree, I was sleeping with Hoenir’s sister, if you must know. Hardly a matter worth noting, but since you’ve brought it up, she had absolutely no desire for power whatsoever. As you can imagine, it was something of a refreshing change.”

  Odin fixed Conrad with a disgruntled look.

  “Sinmara?”

  “Yes, Sinmara. And would you like to know what the great and fearsome terror does these days? Runs a rather nice library, wherein she displays her collection of tiny, porcelain cats. She’ll be sending her armies of monsters and ravagers trampling through Valhalla any day now, provided you’ve a book overdue.”

  “Wait? This is about a woman too?” Conrad interrupted just as Loki reappeared at Lily’s side. “Wow. Even I don’t suck at girls that much.”

  Loki chuckled. “I remember the good ol’ days. Daddy sold off his best girl. Or we stopped by and carried off the girl. Or occasionally, the girl stopped by and carried one of us off. Good times.” He grinned, propping an elbow on Mimir’s chest and his chin in his hand. “Language really buggered everything up, didn’t it, Biflindi?”

  Odin glared at him but didn’t seem surprised Loki wasn’t where he’d left him. He adjusted his suit and glared at Conrad instead.

  “If I let this pass, I’ll have an army nipping at my heels in a fortnight.”

  “I had intended on giving it a year, actually. Believe it or not, I’ve always been rather fond of you, you old bastard. Make no mistake, I absolutely intend on killing you now. But I might keep you around in a crystal ball or a pair of boots or something for old time’s sake.”

  Way to not help, dude. But Odin laughed.

  “I imagine you would, yes,” he said, a calculating look in his eyes. “And I could use the challenge.”

  Loki shrugged and grinned. “Hell yeah. You’re getting really boring in your paranoid old age, Odin. It’s not like I’m about to bust out the bone ship just yet.”

  Something in the way he said just yet made it seem more like Conrad come here. Easing toward them while Odin was distracted, Conrad caught Lily giving him the Face That Meant Something. He suspected it meant hurry up.

  “Perhaps not, no,” Odin agreed. “But if I kill you both now, Ragnarok will be stopped.”

  “Holy fuck, would that be boring. Change is the spice of life. You want to spend the rest of eternity without my parties or Mim’s rampant conspiracy theories? What would you do? Knit? Personally, I’d prefer the end of the world.”

  Finally, Conrad sidled up next to Lily and as close to safety as he was about to get. Looking down, he saw her finger’s laced through Mimir’s. Loki had one arm casually strung through hers, Hothe had an arm casually strung through his and Fenris was biting his pants leg.

  Well, this didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out.

  Conrad twined his fingers through Lily’s free hand with a sort of juvenile glee the situation really probably didn’t warrant.

  “You would,” Odin sniffed. “You get to steer the ship. I just get eaten.”

  “There is that, true.” Loki grinned and winked. “Sucks to be you, I guess.”

  And then, all together in a roar of magic and nightmares and a rush of Conrad didn’t even want to know what, they disappeared.