by Evie Kent
Not acknowledging me, Nora chucked a stone through the bars, frowning when it hit the ground, bounced a few paces, then rolled to a stop.
“Firebird…” My gaze swept over her hair trundling down her back, that black mane thick and luscious after so many dips in our private pool. “Have you nothing better to do?”
To emphasize my point, I snapped an arm around her waist and yanked her to me. She collided against my chest with a soft giggle, a sound that turned to an indignant squeak when my teeth grazed her neck. Little bumps erupted down her arms, up her throat, and she squirmed out of my grasp with a subdued smile, poking me hard in the gut after my lazy attempt to keep her.
“I just…” She plucked another pebble from the ground. “I wanted to see if I could see it.”
Hands threaded behind my back, I crouched down to her level and squinted, all for show, all to make her mouth stretch wider. “See what?”
“The curse,” Nora remarked, tossing the stone through the bars. “The wall that stops you.”
“No, I’m afraid you can’t.” We both watched the pebble bounce and bounce and bounce, then skitter into the shadows of the fading afternoon sunlight. “I can’t either.”
Which was fucking infuriating some days, unable to see the walls of my own bloody tomb.
But I could feel it. Oh, yes, how I could feel it, hard as Thor’s hammer, strong and steadfast as young Vidar, dripping with magic like Freyja. It was there, and I had stopped testing its might long ago.
Nora tossed another stone, distractedly this time, defeatedly maybe, and when she veered too close to the electrified bars, I lashed out like a viper, coiling around her wrist and tearing her back.
“Careful, firebird.”
Her eyes dropped to where we touched, to my hand snapped tight around her delicate, bony wrist. Possessive, my hold, like I had the right to touch and take however I pleased.
Because I did.
“Can we break it?”
I released her, slowly peeling finger after finger from her flesh. “The ward?”
Her arm dropped to her side, hand flexing in and out of a loose fist, her cheeks pink. “Yeah.”
My snort had her blush sharpening in color, and she planted a fist on her hip as I smirked down at her steadily narrowing eyes. “Do you think I’d still be here if I knew the answer to that?”
“No, I mean… All magic has to have an undo button, right?” She had grown far less reactive to me—to my tone, my words, my looks, my moods. I rather liked it, having someone in my life who didn’t react to my every impulse, who allowed me some social leeway when others had staunchly refused.
“Curses like this one have a signature,” I insisted, hands in my pants pockets as I faced the bars, perusing their very existence with disdain. “The witch who cast it and her daughters after would be the only ones capable of undoing it… It’s a very specific lock, I’m afraid, and it needs the exact right key.”
Nora shifted in the corner of my eye, facing the bars alongside me, the pair of us a unified front. Silent for a moment, she rocked side to side, from one leg to the other, hips swaying. “Maybe that exact right key is on Facebook.”
I exhaled a dismissive chuckle. “Don’t get my hopes up, firebird.”
Tucked away in a little rocky crevice, an attempt made with moss and a transported spiderweb to hide it, a dull red light blinked down at us. The laptop wasn’t my first true brush with modern technology, but I had never been privy to the eye my worshippers kept at the front gate, nor had I ever bothered to understand the mechanics until now. A mistake on my part—just another in a long line of fuckups. Gnawing at the inside of my cheek, rage sparking in my gut, I sidled closer to Nora again, enveloping her willowy figure with mine. She fit so perfectly, her back to my chest, her shoulder blades like sparrow wings, her neck like a swan.
Best of all, she smelled like life. Like a world that had aged eight centuries without me, tempting and sumptuous, beckoning me to explore every inch just as I had with her. More literally, my firebird had a faintly floral aroma from the deodorant she used—jasmine, according to the label—combined with the fresh clean scent of the mountain spring.
Exquisite.
She shivered when my mouth found her neck again, her hair nudged aside by my chin, her flesh claimed with the first graze of my teeth.
“Have you noticed them?” I rasped, burning the inquiry up her throat, dragging my parted lips to the base of her ear. “The eyes watching from the shadows?”
Nora’s breath hitched, and her brilliant greens flitted about, searching.
“No, no, don’t be so obvious, firebird,” I rumbled as I wove one hand down her figure, over her bony hips, her strong thigh. The other delved up, crushing the shapeless cotton fabric between her breasts. Up, up, up her elegant neck until I could really grab hold of her chin, stilling her, parting her full lips ever so slightly. My mouth continued to work her flesh, teasing and tormenting, threatening to spill her bright red blood all over my teeth. My hand delved lower, hoisting up her dress, slipping between her thighs. All for show. All for the fucking camera.
Let them think my focus was her, always her, and not them.
In the meantime, I guided her chin just far enough to the right for her to—
“Oh my god,” she murmured, her lower back arched, that perfect ass tucked snugly against me, my cock a sudden and undeniable rod between her cheeks. “Is that…?”
“If it wasn’t there, I would just break the bars and set you free,” I told her—promised her. I would, after all, let her fly away home. Not yet. But one day. When she couldn’t suffer my life a second longer, I’d shoo her back to the real world and tack on luck, fortune, and health… If my reach extended all the way to New York, of course. “But they’re watching. Always watching. They’ll catch you, little firebird, and put you back in your cage. Maybe even clip your wings.” The thought elicited a snarl deep inside me. Down the ramp, dishes rattled and the lights flickered. “I can’t allow that.”
Nora stopped writhing against me, her body going slack. The reminder that there was no escape—I’d fucked this up. My intention had been to distract her, to boost her mood, and all I’d done was make things worse.
Classic Loki.
My cheek twitched, centuries of shame and blame from the other gods burning in my chest, making my throat tight.
Made it worse for both of you now. Don’t let her see. Don’t let her see what a fuckup you are—
Fortunately, I was rather adept at stuffing it all away, deep, deep down where no one ever dared look—my long-entrenched self-loathing. With a forced grin and a semi-erect cock, I spun Nora around and scooped her up, relishing her surprised squeal as I tossed her over my shoulder.
“Come along,” I urged, one hand creeping up her thigh, my thumb probing her damp cleft. “I think I’ve had enough of the internet for today.”
Nora wriggled and squirmed as I stroked her, those dancer’s hands whispering down my back and grabbing at my shirt.
“Oh yeah?” she said with a laugh, sounding much more herself again. “Does that mean you haven’t found the porn yet?”
I slowed my descent down the ramp, racking my vast mental library for the term and coming up short. “The… porn?”
Another giggle, the sound accompanied by a wiggling of her little toes, broken and busted nails healing now that she wasn’t forced to wear those torturous pointe shoes every day.
“Oh, Loki.” Nora patted my backside as we drifted toward the bedroom. “Do I have a treat for you…”
23
Nora
Three months.
I had been inside this fucking mountain for three goddamn months.
May. June. July. Two days until August. Every day, I added another line to the floor of the calendar corridor; Loki had whipped up some chalk out of thin air when we’d realized I wasn’t strong enough to make permanent ticks in the stone like he did. Plus, it hardly seemed fair. In theory, my time here was temporary. His was f
orever. He deserved to dig into the mountain, scar it up, hurt this place like it hurt him.
Ninety days.
Ninety fucking days and I was losing it.
And that was why I had started to accept the odd cocktail. No more whiskey binges for me—I couldn’t take the hangovers or the guilt, but Loki proved himself to be a baller bartender, mixing a shot into my favorite mocktail creations whenever I had an especially hard night.
If I was stuck in here without him, I’d die. Every day, I found myself looking at him when he wasn’t looking at me, wondering how the fuck he had survived this long, how he made it through the long patches of solitude between consorts. As a god, he possessed a strength none of us mere mortals could touch. He knew it. I knew it. All the assholes in the village knew it. But what he didn’t know, maybe what he refused to acknowledge, was that he had an inner strength, too, this fire burning that kept the all-consuming darkness at bay.
I had come to admire that about him.
He was a survivor.
And he knew how to make me laugh even when I absolutely, one hundred percent did not want to.
“I said third position,” I bayed at him, swirling my French Sparkle—mango nectar, a splash of raspberry vodka, a touch of champagne, then a sliced mango over the tumbler’s rim—and pointing at his feet. “What the fuck is that?”
Standing on the oak table like it was our very own stage, Loki looked down at his feet, then threw his hands up. “It’s third position, firebird. Don’t question it—”
“That’s fourth if I’ve ever seen it,” I shot back, hopping off the coffee table and padding over to fix his positioning. “Look. Look at how far apart your feet are. Third position is heels together.”
Similar to first position, third required perfectly straight legs. I slapped at his calves, reminding him to take the bend out of his knees, then nudged his bare feet back so that his ankles lined up. Feet lined up. Ankles together. Straight legs. Perfect third position.
“There,” I said after another sip of my cocktail, the mango dominant and the alcohol a faint afterburn. “That is third position.”
Loki stared down at his feet again, then tapped the tabletop with his toes. “Do little children really do this?”
“Uh, yeah…” I sauntered back with a grin, the expression feeling a little less hollow now than it had an hour ago before we started all this. “Like, five-year-olds do this. There’s a reason they’re called the basic positions.”
And he had them down pat, all five positions. Just like our swing dance lesson, back when he’d forced me through the first real orgasm of my life and I’d then slapped him as hard as I could, Loki picked everything up in seconds. But for me, he played dumb. He gave me just enough to nitpick at. As usual, I knew it and he knew it, but we pretended not to—pretended this was real, like we were ordinary roommates who flirted and fucked to pass the time, not an all-knowing deity and his human consort who both vividly understood the reality of their situation.
“Okay…” After another sip of cold mango deliciousness, I set my glass on the coffee table and clapped my hands together. Loki lifted his eyebrows at me before slugging back the rest of his bourbon. Thankfully, neither of us had ever gotten as drunk as we had on our worst respective nights—that Fact or Fiction drinking game was now a hard limit. “Let’s move on to arm positions.”
“Oh, firebird,” Loki said, sighing and moaning out each syllable like a petulant child. He set his crystal tumbler at the end of the table. “I’d much rather watch you dance.”
He then climbed off, bypassing the bench entirely with those long, strong legs of his, eyes fixed squarely on me. Bearing the brunt of a god’s interest was enough to make anyone weak in the knees. These days, I could handle it—spine straight, chin up, knees locked—like he wasn’t gazing straight through to my soul, but the butterflies in my chest, their flock multiplied tenfold, were such suckers for his intensity.
“Go on,” he purred with a slight nod toward the dark doorway. “Fetch your shoes.”
Three weeks ago, I’d found them just before I climbed into bed. At first, I had no idea what the fuck was on my pillow, stuck in the dark and exhausted from surviving another day… And then I smelled it—the blend of leather and silk. And then I felt them, hard and unbroken, shoes that had never touched a dancer’s feet. New and shiny, just for me.
Loki had sat through hours and hours and hours of filmed performances, some from my company, most from the Bolshoi crowd. He could easily conjure things so long as he had a good picture to work off—and I had known right away, as I clutched a pair of soft pink pointe shoes to my chest, that he had conjured them for me.
Of course, seconds later I burst into tears. Sobbing, I’d staggered from the bedroom to the main hall, where I found him on the couch, surfing the web. Shoving the laptop aside, I collapsed into his arms and just hugged him with every ounce of strength I possessed. Wailed into his neck. Thanked him profusely.
They weren’t my pointe shoes. They weren’t worn in and familiar, contorted to the grooves of my feet, both hardened and softened by countless hours in the studio and on stage.
But I loved them all the same.
I loved them even more after I broke them. Carved up the soles for traction. Beautiful, pristine shoes could be a dancer’s downfall; you had to completely rely on them. To dance, they needed to become an extension of you, just another piece of your body. Shiny and new did nothing for a performer—they were just art at that point. Over the last few weeks, whenever I was feeling especially down, I made Loki’s gift ugly, cracking, cutting, snipping them until they were mine.
“No,” I muttered, tucking my hair behind my ears, not really in the mood to perform for anyone. I hadn’t danced in the shoes yet. Tried them on, yes. Flexed my feet. Tested the strength of the solid tips. But to actually go through the motions of routines I knew better than I knew myself… “No, it’s fine. I don’t—”
“Go on.” Loki closed the distance between us in three long strides, effortless, more graceful than any dancer I knew. “For me.”
As I drew a breath to argue, he caught me by the chin, rough enough to make my heart race. My lashes fluttered, and Loki tipped his head to the side, that fucking smile telling me we both knew he had me.
“I want to watch you dance,” he rumbled.
And that was officially the sexiest thing any man had ever said to me. Devlin used to attend my opening night performances, but we never really discussed the show after—not in the same detail we did for his beloved classic cars, anyway.
“We don’t have any of my music,” I insisted weakly, feeling a slight wobble in my knees when his grin sharpened and his grip hardened. “Or good floor to dance on—”
“I’ll take care of that.” Loki looked more pointedly to the door, the message clear. “Fetch them.” He squeezed hard, forcing my lips apart, jerking me a few inches into his personal bubble, my feet scrambling to keep up. “Now.”
Ugh. Why did I find him so fucking hot when he got all bossy?
And why, after all this time, hadn’t a bossy, demanding, rough Loki lost its shine? Why did it still get me all riled up?
“Fine,” I sneered, twisting my chin out of his grasp and shooting him an over-the-top scowl, “but you’re getting Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and you’ll like it.”
Loki crossed his arms with a snort. “Will I? Fairies are assholes.”
I stared up at him for a beat, then shook my head and waved him off. Right. Obviously if gods were a thing, fairies were, too—discussion for another day.
Because at no point would I let my divine fuckbuddy sully my memory of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Although I had never performed one of the most complex principal roles on stage, I’d been an understudy last December when we performed The Nutcracker for night after night of sold-out halls. Even though I was officially listed as Dewdrop on the playbill, I had spent countless hours learning the Sugar Plum Fairy’s routine on the off chance that Aubrey�
�two years my senior at the academy and an exceptional principal dancer—couldn’t perform.
I’d never danced it for anyone but my company. Never needed to don the elaborate costume or wear the fairy’s crown. Aubrey had nailed every performance from our first night to the last.
A strange giddiness fluttered in my chest as I scampered toward the bedroom, my feet already getting into character for the delicate, dainty footwork of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Ideally, she floated across the stage, effortless, like her pointe shoes never touched the ground.
Her routine hadn’t crossed my mind in months, yet now, as I dug Loki’s present out from under my pillow, every step flashed across my mind’s eye. Muscle memory kicked in, my shoulders rolling into their proper perfect posture, my fingers ballerina-graceful as they coiled around my shoes. Energy thrummed through me from top to bottom, my lips twitching into a performer’s smile—the one we wore that said no, our feet weren’t killing us, that dancing on our tiptoes was fucking painless.
When I returned to the main hall, I discovered Loki had been busy in my absence: the huge oak table and its benches had been pushed farther into the kitchen area, all tucked away, the space open. To my right, the armchairs were now stored neatly against the cave wall next to the couch, the coffee table positioned alongside them. So much room to roam, for one coupé jeté after another after another. There were many in her dance…
Giddiness exploded inside, making my legs tremble with every step and my arms quiver with preperformance energy.
“What the fuck happened to your shoes?” Loki growled, staring down at them with a mildly horrified expression as he settled on the table’s edge, bourbon in hand. I tapped a finger against the slashed bottoms, grinning.
“I made them mine.”
That seemed to satisfy him; as I headed for the couch to lace up, Loki refilled his drink, all the while wearing this little smile that I don’t think he meant for me to see, so soft and subtle—and human, in a strange way.
Once I had my shoes on, laced as tightly as I could, I fell into my usual stretching routine for my feet, flexing them, arching them, warming up my hamstrings. After months of no dancing, even before I’d left for Norway, my life back home in shambles, I couldn’t just jump into the fairy’s routine. I’d pull something—everything, more like—and I wouldn’t be able to let Loki fix me. If you were a dancer, pain was part of the job. One of my mentors always said that if you woke up in the morning without pain, you were no longer a dancer.