by Evie Kent
Several days ago, before the most recent food delivery, I had innocently asked about what humans her age did for fun. That eventually led me to party food, and she had rattled off options—chips, popcorn, dip, beer, pizza, and liquor shots—without realizing I had catalogued each one to craft some mood of tonight’s game.
And now here she was, scanning the table full of salty treats, the shot glasses. Her hands left her hips, and she slowly crossed her arms, that suspicious expression faltering and understanding slowly dawning.
Yes, yes, I listen when you speak, little one.
“Okay, so, how do you win?” she asked quietly, her dark, thick brows knitted. My grin sharpened.
“How do I win?” Cracking open the vodka bottle to my right, an assortment of other potent elixirs lined up neatly at the table’s edge, I held her gaze as I filled each of our shot glasses. “I win everything, pet. The question is, how do you—”
Nora threw her hands up, then turned on the spot. “I’m out.”
“All right, all right, all right, settle down, you ridiculous woman.” I capped the vodka with a sigh, its acrid scent threatening to overtake the aggressive melted-butter odor wafting out from the popcorn bowl to my left. “You see, I think we both win, as we’ll walk away tonight knowing just a bit more about each other.”
She wrinkled her nose down at me, quiet for a moment, possibly even contemplative, until: “Gross.”
Fuck, why did I love it when she was mean? I hummed in agreement, drumming my fingers on the table. “Hmm. A little, yes. It’s really just a conversation thinly disguised as a drinking game.” My eyes dipped to the spot on the bench directly across from me. “Sit down.”
Nora wet her full bottom lip, the flick of her tongue such a fucking tease, then nudged at the bench with her knee. “Fine, but I’m not drinking. You can take that shot yourself.”
Of course. All of this would be so much smoother, far more straightforward, if she would just let a few pints of ale lower her inhibitions. But alas, that was the challenge.
“Oh, boring,” I growled, snatching a few pieces of popcorn and hurling them at her as she marched down the table and around to the fridge. Predictable, her refusal to imbibe, but that didn’t mean I’d let her get away with it unscathed. “Boring, boring, boring.”
“Do we have any mango juice left?” she asked, totally unfazed by my response—and for some reason that gave me a strangely sick thrill. It would wear off, fade away, lose its charm in time, but for now, her defiance made me a touch hard. How delicious it would be to finally break her.
“Check the door.”
That was her favorite—mango juice. I’d noted that she drank it the fastest, in the biggest glasses, and made sure new cartons of the stuff came with every food haul. Anything to soften that prickly exterior, one thorn at a time.
She returned a few moments later, jug in hand, and climbed onto the bench. Her full shot glass still sat between us, and she looked down at it for a beat, then pinned me with a raised-brow stare that had me snorting. Really, the balls on this woman. The audacity. Had I been a less lenient god, a man hell-bent on crushing the female spirit, she would have been well and truly fucked.
Two weeks in, one would think her boldness had become taxing—dull. After all, I was just dying to bed her, to fuck her raw and hear her scream, to drink in her pleasure, make her bend to my will, my prowess…
But no. The game was still fresh.
Besides, two weeks was nothing to an immortal. A blink of the eye. A flicker of candlelight in the bleak darkness of eternity.
One hand locked tight around the juice carton’s handle, Nora used the other to tuck her hair behind her ear. Someday soon, I’d wrap those black waves around my fist. I tipped my head to the side, grinning again, and then chuckled when she nudged the shot glass across the table next to mine.
“Fine,” I muttered, snatching it up and shooting it back, barely tasting its burn as the liquid spilled down my throat and coated my insides. I then slid it back to her, and the same sick thrill twisted in my chest when she filled the glass with mango juice—and didn’t wipe the rim. Look at that. One sip and we had practically kissed.
“So, who starts?” she asked, both hands coiled around her drink. I gestured to her with a flutter of my lashes.
“Ladies first, of course.”
Her cheeks hollowed—like she was gnawing at them, one of her many habits I’d noted in the last fourteen days. She bit down on the insides of her cheeks when she was either nervous or thinking; I had yet to decipher the nuances between the pair, but I would. I had the fucking time.
“Your name is Loki.”
I blinked back at her, stunned and immensely disappointed with what had just come out of her mouth. “W-what?”
Nora shrugged. “You heard me.”
“That—”
“Is my first fact,” she finished for me, the cocky creature. She mirrored my shit-eater grin from earlier, then fluttered her long black eyelashes impishly.
Petulant, bratty, smug little—
At least she’s playing the game.
Sighing, I took my first official shot, then refilled it to the top as I muttered, “Loki Laufeyjarson, technically, but I suppose I’ll allow it.”
Nora rolled her eyes, big and dramatic, all for show, and tapped at the side of her glass with one perfectly round nail. I fixed her with a hard look for a moment, then cleared my throat.
“Your work—your profession—is dependent on your beauty.”
“Ugh, boo.” Her face screwed with incredulous laughter, and she nodded to my glass. “Fiction. Drink.”
Had I so poorly misread her? No. A fetching vixen like this one had to get by on her looks.
“You’re lying,” I said, words tinged with a growl that had her settling somewhat.
“Drink or don’t play.” Her eyes followed my glass as I raised it to my lips and tossed back its contents. “And I’m not lying.”
“You know, if it’s fiction, you have to clarify why it’s fiction,” I insisted, the vodka bottle’s narrow mouth clinking against my shot glass on the next refill. Nora smirked, enjoying this far, far too much for my liking. The point of playing a game was to turn the tide in my favor, not hers.
“Oh, is that in the official rule book?” She looked left, then right, then back to me. “You got one lying around somewhere?”
My lips thinned, the air stilling around us, and as if sensing she had poked the bear one too many times, she exhaled sharply and fidgeted with her hair again, pointedly avoiding my gaze.
“I’m a ballet dancer,” she told me flatly. “Everyone thinks they know us, but we’re athletes. We train hard, and if you can’t hack it, you don’t make the company. I fought for my place in New York, beat out a ton of other dancers. You can make anyone pretty with the right makeup, good hair, a beautiful costume, but if you can’t keep up, you’re out. It’s grueling work—it’s everything to me, and I didn’t get it because of how I look.” She cracked her knuckles noisily, scowling down at the table before finally meeting my eyes. “I’m a soloist in my company—first soloist. I’m not, like, the lead. My goal was to get to principal in the next few seasons, but I dance complicated roles too. Usually I’m in the studio all day… I’ve been on a sabbatical for a while.”
A dancer. An athlete. That came as a surprise, but perhaps that explained her exceptional physique. While I knew very little about the craft of ballet, I’d ask for reference materials from the villagers during the next delivery; it was my understanding that their crops were the best in the country this year. They could pay me back with books on Nora’s profession.
“I take it you miss it, then?” Her passion was obvious from the way she spoke about it, and I quite liked that. Desire. Drive. Dedication. In one question, I had learned so much more about her than I had in two weeks of study.
“Yeah, I’m pissed that circumstances got in the way,” she muttered as she nibbled on a single piece of popcorn. “I wo
rked my whole life to get to where I was, and then… bullshit happened.”
And it’s not fair.
The unspoken sentiment echoed uncomfortably close to my own narrative.
Shaking her head, Nora sat up straighter and pinned me with another smug look, like she had a fact at the ready, another excuse to make me drink.
Maybe she wanted to get me drunk.
This girl was full of surprises, after all.
“You started the Norse apocalypse,” she stated. “Ragnarok.”
Ah, yes. I had been waiting for that one. “Fiction.”
Dumbfounded, she blinked back at me. “What?”
“Fiction. Drink.”
“You are literally in prison for this—”
My cool chuckle had her pressing her lips together, and I reached across the table to poke her shot glass toward her. “Yes, of course, because all men behind bars are guilty.”
Nora frowned for a beat, then downed her juice in one gulp.
“I suppose I tend to be associated with its beginning,” I mused as she poured herself another glass. “It was foretold that I would only escape bondage in that first cave when Ragnarok—”
“Oh my god, wait.” She slapped the juice carton down. “You’ve been locked up in a cave before? This has happened to you twice?”
“Do you want to hear the story or not,” I crooned, eyes narrowed, and Nora held up her hands innocently before shoving one in the chip bowl. “Now then. It was foretold that I would only escape that first sentence at the end of the Aesir’s reign, that I would remain bound and chained in my sons’ entrails—”
“What the actual fuck,” she muttered before shoving a curled chip into her mouth with a grimace. I showed her a flash of teeth, skimming right over the horrors of smelling my own sons’ bowels in the chains that bound me to that fucking rock.
“Yes, times were a little harsher a thousand years ago, but that was the way in all the realms.” I rubbed at a splash of vodka on the table, smearing it away. “Modern humans are so soft.”
“Off topic.”
I held up a finger to concede her point. “Yes. Agreed. Anyway, there are three signs, three instances, that were said to bring about the apocalypse. First—the murder of Baldur, the most beloved of the gods. I… played a slight part in that.”
Nora stared at me from across the table, expression riddled with disbelief as she chewed her recent mouthful like a cow chewed its cud. Clearly she didn’t believe that my part in his death was slight—and I suppose I didn’t either. The sun god had died by my orchestration. No getting around it. I had lived all my life insisting I hadn’t dealt the death blow, that my hands were clean.
But my hands were as bloody as all the rest.
“Second,” I pressed on, counting them off with my fingers, “is that there would be three long years of winter. No summers between—just bleak days and bitter, cold nights. Brothers would turn against brothers. Warfare, famine, and strife would erupt in the human realm as we gods teetered on the brink of conflict ourselves, with the giants, with each other.” I hoisted a third finger. “Lastly, a great darkness would rise when the wolves of the world consumed the sun. Then the roosters would visit the giants, the Aesir, and the land of the dead, crowing for war, the final battle—the doom.”
Nora blinked back at me again, still slowly chewing, her cheeks sunken when she wasn’t. Thinking. “Right.”
“I suppose I broke the first seal, if you will, by ensuring Baldur’s demise,” I admitted tentatively. Upon hearing the prophecy for the end of days, his mother, Queen Frigg, had insisted all the creatures and plants of this world swear fealty to Baldur, promising to never harm her favorite son.
But she had missed mistletoe, the smallest of them all—forgotten it as the others always forgot me. Back then, I so delighted in proving Odin and his ilk wrong, so loved shining a beacon on their failings.
Hurled unknowingly by his blind twin at my suggestion, a single dart of mistletoe had been Baldur’s undoing.
And then—well, it was too late to stop it. Fuming, my blood brother Odin All-father condemned me to the first cave, to lay bound to a stone by my sons’ guts as a snake dripped venom onto my forehead for eternity.
“Centuries later,” I stressed, my point on the horizon, “Ragnarok occurred. So, really—”
“So, really, it’s fact and fiction,” Nora argued, wiping her salty fingers on her sleeve. I opened and closed my mouth a few times, both impressed and mildly annoyed by her deduction.
“I simply played a small role—”
“Fact and fiction,” she said with a nod to my glass. “Drink.”
I felt the liquor’s burn this time, scorching down my throat and adding to the inferno brewing in my belly. Yet as I went for the bourbon, in need of a new taste in my mouth, there was this strange buoyancy that accompanied my movements. Nora was the first consort I had ever shared my story with, the first one who seemed interested in knowing the full history—such as it was, anyway. That time in the world was muddled, written records destroyed, most of the participants dead and rotted, ash on the ground and blood on my hands. To the best of my knowledge, a few of the lesser goddesses survived the doom, but of course none ever came looking for me.
That witch, an acolyte of Freya—I was the only one important enough left to blame when the dust finally started to settle, my wounds substantial courtesy Heimdallr’s blade. Ravna had gotten the better of me, promising to tend to me as I lay dying, but instead trapping me here as punishment for her mistress’s death.
No matter. She was dead now, at the very least. Someone had butchered her—even if it was just the ravages of time.
“The last man you loved,” I started, my eyes narrowed as they swept keenly over Nora. When she stiffened, her cheeks pink, I had my answer—my distraction, something vastly more fun to pick at than the brutality of the past. “The last man you loved broke your heart.”
“Fact,” she admitted hoarsely before shooting back her juice. “I thought I was going to marry him, but, you know, so did my best friend.”
My eyebrows shot up, and she shook her head, full lips in a thin line.
“Maeve… She thought… They’d been fucking for almost a year before I found out. Thought they were soulmates and all that bullshit.”
“Ah.” When she glanced up shyly, I flicked my gaze to the battalion of booze lined up at the end of the table. Drown your sorrows, girl. Nora shook her head, but for a moment she appeared at least slightly tempted. Shrugging, I rotated my shot glass in a slow circle. “His loss.”
“Whatever,” she muttered, brushing a thumb under her eye before tipping her head back with a sigh. “They seem happy together, so, you know, maybe they are soulmates. At least I didn’t marry him.”
“Would you like me to fuck with him?”
Her head rolled forward, and she dug into the side of her neck with her thumb. “What?”
“I’m not sure my reach extends all the way to America, but I can try—”
“No,” she said hurriedly, eyes wide. “No, it’s fine.”
My mouth spread into a hollow grin. “Coward.”
Nora stopped massaging the dip between her neck and shoulders, fire flaring in her eyes and in her cheeks. Hands in fists, she stuffed them under the table and looked me dead in the eye. “You loved her—the woman I look like. You miss her.”
A lump settled in my throat, hard and thick and resilient. Although I saw hints of my former wife in all the women the villagers brought me, I tried so fucking hard not to think of her, not to picture her face in theirs. If I could help it, I preferred not to address her at all, for she was soft and sweet, unflinchingly loyal, shackled to a monster all the other gods mocked.
Dead at the hands of a giant—after centuries of tending to her half-giant husband. In the great war, for all my posturing, I’d ended up backing the side that butchered her.
Nora was the first determined to know her, too. The first to hear my story, the
first to prod at the one memory I truly cherished.
Before the bloodshed, that is—the few pleasant memories before the doom.
I clenched my jaw briefly, then picked up my full-to-the-brim shot glass. “That’s two.”
“Two what?”
“Two facts,” I said tersely before throwing back the amber liquid. Its bite burned harsher than the vodka, and still I went back for more—needing it, the promise of a dreamless sleep and a hazy mind. For I had once loved her and I still missed her. “You… Your favorite juice is mango.”
The little human’s expression faltered; we both knew that was a weak one. Perhaps she realized she had struck a nerve, as her throat dipped sharply with a gulp, and Nora slurped her drink without a word.
But then she came back swinging.
“She died in Ragnarok.”
Scowling, I tossed back my drink with one hand and snatched up the bourbon bottle with the other. “My wife was murdered, yes, defending the shackled remnants of what was once our family homestead.”
Nora blanched, but I ignored the implications of it, the suggestion of some internal conflict brewing inside—because she had continued to push. Many of my old kin liked to push, eventually realizing that I could only be pushed so far before I retaliated tenfold.
“You’re alone in this world,” I sneered. “No family, few friends.”
That was a given as well: the villagers wouldn’t have selected her, even if her appearance was the closest of all of them, the loveliest, the most beautiful I had seen in centuries—not if she had an army of loved ones who would search for her if she vanished. An easy win for me, an obvious fact, and I relished her pinched expression, the dart of color in her cheeks. Discussing Sigyn hurt, remembering her battered corpse hurt, knowing that I wasn’t there to save her hurt, and it was only fair to return the favor.
Nora refilled her empty shot glass with a trembling hand, glowering across the table at me. “You feel guilty for her death.”