by Evie Kent
And I finally had enough sense to just get out of the way. My body launched into flight mode, but I had to pivot and duck for cover with a shriek, heart in my throat, when a cabinet flung over my head and slammed into the doorway that led off to the rest of our prison, smashing into dozens of little wooden pieces. Hoping—praying, maybe even to him—that Loki’s wrath was reserved for the kitchen, I did a one-eighty and beelined for the sitting area. Shoved the couch away from the wall and crawled behind it. Curled into a ball, arms over my head, and waited out the storm.
A thousand years later, it all went quiet. Loki’s fury stopped thundering through the mountain and rattling deep into the earth. No more crunching glass or splintering wood. No more silverware clattering to the ground. Just—silence. Fingers cold and numb, I sat up straighter, which triggered a wave of dizziness and panic. My breath came harder, faster, but I still crawled up the back of the couch, using it and the cave wall for support—because my legs sure as fuck couldn’t hold me up right now.
All destroyed. Everything. Cabinets torn off, marble in pieces. The fridge at the foot of the ramp. The oven door wedged into the couch. Dust and debris floated around him, this fuming god, who stood there shaking just as visibly as I did. While I fought back a flood of anxiety, breath coming hard and fast, Loki seemed to struggle to catch his, hands limp at his side, head bowed.
He had flipped that huge table. Hurled it clear across the hall so that it stood upright below the landing at the top of the ramp. The benches were on their sides. I gulped; had I had stayed there, sitting and screaming and cowering, would I have been spared? Would he have even noticed me?
I suddenly felt really… small.
Insignificant.
And claustrophobic.
Hit with a rush of heat, I shuffled out from behind the couch, from the two feet of space that had felt so protective a minute ago, now stifling and tight. Only my body didn’t want to move; it wanted to hunker down and hide. I pushed it as much as I could before eventually slumping back against the wall.
“Did… Did you ask them about us?” My gut somersaulted, adding nausea to the mix. Great. “About what they do with us?”
Still glaring at the ground, chasing his breath, Loki just nodded. His stony silence post-meltdown said a lot.
“Sucks when people lie to you, huh?” I mused, the feeling painfully familiar, Devlin and Maeve and Oskar all compounding in my brain, a sea of lies waiting for me outside of this mountain. The only one who hadn’t bullshitted me—as far as I knew, as far as my instinct allowed me to believe—was the father of all lies.
What the fuck had become of my life?
Seriously.
My lower lip wobbled when Loki finally looked up, his eyes soaring to mine. They blazed up my figure like they had an anchor attached, a tether weighing them down, heavy and exhausted and destroyed.
I’d been right.
The villagers didn’t let us leave. I could never go home. My fears—all one hundred percent valid.
And there was nothing either of us could do about any of it.
I folded over with a strangled cry, grief and panic tangling together, the combination detonating like a nuclear bomb. The shock wave scorched everything I had left inside, flayed me alive, and I sank to the ground, sobbing.
A light touch to my wrist quieted what could have easily been a full-blown panic attack. My head shot up, eyes swimming with hot tears, cheeks wet, nose stuffed, and Loki wrapped an arm around my shoulders. Without hesitation or waiting for an invite, I just climbed into his lap—knowing that I weighed nothing to him, that my shuffling and rearranging, my curling up and bawling into his chest felt like nothing. Seconds after I settled, shuddering against him, he snaked both arms around me, one coiled tight around my waist while the other hand threaded into my hair.
“I won’t let them have you, firebird,” he murmured against my forehead, his lips cold, his breath hot, his words a promise that tattooed itself across my skin. “I swear it. You will go home, as I always intended.”
Numbly, I nodded—because I believed him, this god, the only constant in my world right now who understood. Maybe I was a fucking idiot to fall for it, to accept whatever he had to say on blind faith, but what else could I do? Fight?
I wasn’t sure I had any fight left.
But I also wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in this cave or that fucking village. I was not going to die here.
So, I let him hold me. I fisted my hands into his shirt and clung to him.
All the while wondering, now that everybody was on the same page, now that the truth was out there…
Where the hell did that leave me?
21
Nora
Mountain runoff sluiced down my back in cold, heavy tracks, and I staggered to a halt in the bedroom doorway. “Oh my god, is that…?”
I had never seen light in our little sleep-fucking den before, and only one thing out there could cast Loki’s divine features in such a sickly white glow.
It was finally here.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Modern technology. Proof that the rest of the world existed—that I hadn’t always been here and everything that came before was a lie.
Wrapped in nothing but a towel, I ran squealing into the room, then— “Fuck,” when I smoked my knee on the bedframe.
“Honestly,” Loki muttered, brows furrowed, squinted eyes fixed on the too-bright laptop screen. “You’d think every time you walk in here is the first time—”
“Shut up and gimme.” I plopped down next to him on his side of the bed, our hips together, and threaded my arm under his to snatch the device away. “This… You did it. You got it.”
“Was there ever any doubt?” he crooned, leaning back on his elbows. “I seem to have turned it on and completed the initial setup.”
All without a power cord. Again. I smoothed my fingers greedily over the brand-new keys. So unlike my laptop back home—none of the letters worn off, no dust collecting under the space bar, the screen not splattered with toothpaste droplets from that one time I pulled my electric toothbrush out of my mouth while watching a show, the whirling head still going and spraying everything in a two-foot radius with spit and paste. So. Beautiful.
“Did you have a good swim, firebird?” Loki murmured, walking his fingers up my back—hard over the towel-covered bits, soft over my bare skin. My nipples pebbled and my arms prickled with goose bumps.
“Hmm, yeah,” I said distractedly. After last night’s epic meltdown, Loki and I had spent a lot of time just sitting there in silence, me mulling over my depressing future inside this fucking mountain and him ruminating over the fact that his worshippers had been lying to him for centuries. This morning, when I had padded out for breakfast, all puffy-eyed and miserable, I’d found the kitchen fully restored like nothing had happened, not a piece out of place. Loki had even seemed to be in a slightly better mood, and a part of me now wondered if it was because of this, the special delivery that must have arrived before I woke.
Had he been trying to set it up for me while I’d taken my morning swim?
Five butterflies flitted around my chest now, steadily growing in numbers, smitten with whatever gesture Loki did that could be construed as sweet. My head knew better. This god wasn’t sweet: he was just trying to survive in as comfortable, peaceful a setting as possible. Picking fights with each other—because we were bored, frustrated, sad, lonely—just made a bad situation a thousand times worse.
“Did they acquire us a good model?”
“Honestly, I don’t know much about computers,” I told him, clicking on the internet icon and squealing when a window popped up and holy fuck we’re connected. “But it looks new. The keys are clacky, and it’s fast.”
“Excellent.” Loki sat up, jostling me as he curved an arm around my waist, his hand planted on the bed next to my hip. “Let’s investigate a way out of here, shall we? I did what I could to connect to the, er, interweb.”
“Yeah,
you’re fucking amazing,” I whispered, typing whatever random shit came to mind in the search engine—New York City, The School of American Ballet, my favorite pizza place a block away from my old apartment, that one bar that stole my fake ID when I was seventeen… Not Devlin McDervish. “Seriously. I don’t know how you do it.”
“A lot of concentration.”
A quick glance over showed the pinch of his brows, the twitch in his eye, the thinning of his lips. Seriously though. He was amazing. The butterflies in my chest flapped harder, and I leaned in to kiss his cheek. Loki blinked down at me, stiffening, and I shrugged at the unspoken question dangling between us, my lips tingling from his cool skin, the coarse grate of his scruff.
“Thank you.” And I meant it—from the bottom of my heart. “This is going to make life in here a lot easier for me.”
“Good.” He studied me for a beat, all those little tells of intense focus never once faltering, the internet a full five bars. “I’m glad. Now…” Loki rolled his shoulders back, both of us brushing off the tender moment like it too had never happened. “Shall we research Ravndal? Perhaps locate a map of the surrounding—”
“Oh my god, no.” Heart in my throat, I snapped the laptop shut, extinguishing its full brightness. A familiar black blanketed the room, and Loki cleared his throat awkwardly beside me.
“So—”
“No, it’s just…” I took a deep breath, mentally ticking off all the things we would have to do to this laptop first. Firewalls and malware detectors and whatever else the tech geek articles suggested to keep this thing safe. “Those assholes probably put so much stuff on here to keep track of our searches, maybe even the keystrokes. It’s doable.” Not that I knew how, my expertise leaning more toward the precise body mechanics of a perfect fouetté rather than computer security. “We can’t let on that we’re trying to find an escape for me.”
Last night, he had promised that he wouldn’t let them have me—that he would find a way home. At the time, I had been so overwhelmed with the truth finally landing, all my suspicions confirmed, that I hadn’t had time to really digest his promise. This morning, in the cool light of day, Loki’s vow made me melt.
He actually cared what happened to me outside of this place, what would become of me when I finally left.
A shame that after all this time, he couldn’t eventually leave alongside me. Eight hundred years had to warrant a parole hearing, right?
“They can track our movements on the line?”
I bit back a grin; he could learn the proper slang later.
“Probably,” I told him with a huff. “I mean… You’re a god, sure, but you’re basically just a prisoner. Unlike me, you’re a high-value captive, right? They’ll do what they can to keep tabs on you, maybe even hack the webcam so they can watch us in here—”
“What?”
“Okay, simmer down.” Even in the darkness, I felt his rage, volcanic again and seconds away from imploding. No need to trash yet another room, especially one where I couldn’t take cover in. I patted his thigh, the limb thick and sturdy, more muscular than any male dancer I’d seen—like steel when I’d sank my teeth into it the other night before wrapping my lips around his cock. “We can cover the webcam with a piece of tape or something, then we need to figure out what to search that won’t come across as a red flag if they see it. We can do this. We…” I pursed my lips, rethinking that. “You can outsmart them.”
“Agreed.” Another long beat of silence stretched between us, until Loki’s fingers found my damp hair, swooping it aside to expose my neck. “Are you so eager to leave me, firebird?”
My belly looped at the softness of his words, each one touched by a whiff of vulnerability. It tugged at my heartstrings, his tone, but I forcefully reminded myself that, again, it wasn’t about me; I would be broken too if my only companion in seventy-plus years was itching to bail.
Clearing my throat, I stood and readjusted my towel, tugging it up to cover as much of myself as I could. “It’s not about you… anymore.” I waited for a chuckle, both of us highly aware that the start of this—us—had been combative at best. When he stayed quiet, the distant echoes of the waterfall almost answering for him, I fidgeted, heat pluming in my cheeks. “You… You know that, right?”
“Of course,” he said, firmer this time—but still sad. Still lonely, both of us lost in the dark. My fingers twitched toward him, as if to sweep through his hair for once, but I dug them into my towel and stepped away.
“Okay, well, let me get dried off and get cleaned up.” Somewhere far away from him so we could both regroup after whatever the fuck had just happened in the last thirty seconds. “And then when I’m done… Loki, god of mischief, I would very much like to introduce you to the planet Earth of today through the wonders of the world wide web.”
22
Loki
Midgard had changed since the days I walked it.
Aggressively.
Perhaps for the better, perhaps not—that remained to be seen.
Good or bad, I had spent the last four days consuming all I could through a brightly lit screen. The new nations. The global wars. The shifting political dynamics—very few kings and jarls nowadays. Far more democratic leadership, far more rebellion in the streets. Social media was a treasure trove of insight into modern-day humanity. Videos, moving pictures with sound and color, were a fucking treat. Nora had taken the time to show me her old life—photos of her friends, her family, her dance studio. Two days ago, we’d sat together in bed and watched hours of ballet, just for her.
And for me. To hear the joy in her voice, see it shimmer in her eyes, in the authentic lift of her lips and the nonstop babbling explanations about every move, every leap, every turn, every frock…
It was endearing.
Made me smile.
Made me… content.
The internet was a marvelous creation akin to my long-forgotten gifts—the ability to see beyond this world, to detect lies from truths, to reach into a human’s mind and sift through their past. Odin would have been furious, for he had lost his eye for this sort of knowledge, for the ability to search up anything and everything, to find the answers—detailed explanations—in seconds.
It lifted my spirits.
And it infuriated me beyond compare.
For it had been kept from me for decades, all this “smart” technology that humans like Nora took for granted. Jakob and his ilk had hoarded knowledge, kept it for themselves, while I gifted them with luck and fortune and favorable weather. In return, they offered me old books and quail eggs for my fucking breakfast. Cloth and trinkets. Consorts like Nora were the only gifts of real value my pathetic acolytes had ever given me. Her companionship trumped the wonders of the internet—barely, mind you, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
Little Nora, my firebird… So excited about the laptop, so keen to show me television shows and New York City and old photos of her parents. So vibrant after weeks of collapsing in on herself anytime we weren’t fucking. For the last four days, she had seen to all the cooking, unable to pry me away from the laptop—yet never far herself.
But this morning, she had crawled out of our bed in a familiar grey fog. Her eyes hollow. Her smile forced. It had returned, the desolate misery that I knew so well, my constant bedfellow in this wretched mountain. Understandable. Something new and shiny could only distract for so long before this place crushed your happiness to dust.
So, on the afternoon of the fifth day, I finally closed the laptop. It died immediately on my lap, hot and heavy, the little fan whirring slower and slower until it stopped. No longer forced to fuel it from my own reserves, my concentration waned—and a wave of exhaustion hit. So much learning. So much focus. I hadn’t felt this drained in years, and I let my arms slump to my sides, my head flop back against the wall, alone in the bedroom, sprawled out on the bed. Eyes rimmed with bags, I flicked them down at the laptop, itching to open it and dive back in.
Strange, this su
dden addiction to technology. I’d always had a thirst for knowledge, but having such unfettered access from my own bed certainly upped the ante.
But I would see to Nora instead. Her mood necessitated companionship—because there was always the risk I might lose her. If she collapsed too far in on herself, a star imploding before my eyes, no one and nothing would bring her back.
And how terrible—to lose such ferocity, to watch my firebird die.
That being said, for her own sake, I did want her to leave this place, return to her Manhattan borough, take to the stage again. Dance her little heart out before a crowd of adoring onlookers. She had the charisma for it, the body, the agility, the all-consuming passion. It seemed a shame to lock her away in here forever.
Yet I craved her company just a little while longer.
The thought of her leaving me hit harder than it had for any of my previous consorts, and not just because I would once again be so painfully alone… but because Nora would be gone. A very distinct, crucial difference. It wasn’t my pain that I feared, but her absence.
Another strange addiction—not for information, but for her, a slip of a girl who put me in my place with nothing but a raised eyebrow and a pursed mouth.
With a heavy sigh, I pushed the laptop off my thighs and rolled out of bed. Stiff all over, I emerged from the bedroom like some hideous cave troll, eyes tired, an irritating ache in my skull. Scrubbing at my face, I sauntered into the main hall—and immediately found her at our prison’s gated mouth. I stretched my limbs with every step, twisting this way and that on my amble up the ramp, not stopping until I was by her side, slightly more alert at the sight of her delectable calves, a hint of thigh exposed beneath the hem of her pinstriped summer dress. White with pale blue lines, it possessed a shapelessness that I despised, but Nora had insisted it was comfortable.
I mean, if she wanted to be comfortable, why wear anything at all?