by Mackenzi Lee
Humanity was truly disgusting.
The entrance to the Inferno Club sat in the middle of the block, amid the sooty, stained shops and the tenement houses with laundry strung between them. In a block of ordinary facades, it was a gold tooth in a rotted mouth—the door was guarded by two stone demons wrapping themselves around the frame, wings extended and tails curled over the lintel. They looked down at the queue of people waiting to get in, their mouths open in a wild, toothy cackle that flanked the words painted in gold: The Inferno. Below that, in vertical letters along the sides of the frame, ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Which was a tad dramatic.
Loki joined the back of the queue waiting to get into the club. The patrons were all dressed extravagantly compared to what he’d seen most people wearing on the streets—veils and tall hats with stuffed birds perched upon them and long swirls of crepe dragging along the ground. Everything black. He considered letting his nails go back to the black he usually painted them, but no one else in his sights had colored nails. Best not to press his luck. From within the club, the strains of a screeching string instrument floated, haunted and ghostly sounding. The crowd was buzzing, high on their elevated heart rates and a small thrill of fear that was already lurking.
Humans were both disgusting and easily amused.
Beyond the door, there were stairs leading downward, and the walls and ceiling around them had been shaped to form a sort of tunnel. The tunnel was lit with unshaded gas lamps, burning open and hot along the walls, just enough light to illuminate the fact that the tunnel was lined with more of the demons from the door. They curled upon each other, scrabbling over their fellows and pushing each other into the ground. Their heads were bald and round, small horns poking out and each face pointed and wicked. Below them, reliefs were carved of naked humans screaming in agony, like the torch flames were the fires of hell sucking them under as the demons pressed them down. Behind him, Loki heard a woman give a small shriek that then broke off into a delighted laugh, her group of friends joining in with her.
The steps down through the tunnel ended in a black curtain, which, when Loki pushed it back, revealed the club itself. The lighting was lower here, with lanterns hanging in cages made from bones at random intervals. The walls were draped in heavy black curtains, pulled back into elegant folds. But the whole thing was rather sensationalized. The tables were shaped like coffins, the walls between the curtains decorated with skeletons and bones and devilish faces. Scenes of battles and beheadings were painted above the bar, along with a sign proclaiming NOXIOUS POISONS. Below it, a list: cancer of the liver, consumptive germ, cholera from a corpse. The man behind the bar was dressed as a monk, a heavy crucifix made of bone hanging off his neck. As Loki passed him, the man sucked his teeth, then spat a wad of gray saliva into an ashtray.
The room was already crowded, the tables stuffed with people dressed like mourners, some of them looking giddy with the horror of the place, others sweating and sickly. “I’ve had too much,” a man at the bar cried, swaying on his stool. “Too. Much. Plague. It isn’t good for you.”
In the corner farthest from the tunnel entrance, the black curtains were closed, and a man dressed in a funerary suit seemed to be standing guard before them, his arms as wide around as Loki’s waist. The sign above his head read THE SEVENTH CIRCLE, and below that, THE ENCHANTRESS. Loki’s chest constricted around his thudding heart. Breathe.
The man at the doorway watched Loki approach from across the room, his eyes half obscured by his thick brows. The hood of his heavy cloak was slipping backward down his bald head.
“Good evening,” Loki said. “I’d like to see the Enchantress.”
“Ten bob,” the man grunted.
“Excuse me?”
The man raised one of his shrubbery eyebrows. “Ten bob,” he said slowly. “Half sovereign. For a seat.”
“A seat?” Loki repeated.
“Are you daft?” The man wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then smeared it on his trousers. “You buy a seat for the show, you see the Enchantress.”
“Do I look like the sort of person who wants to sit through a show?” Loki asked.
The man gave him an appraising up and down. “You look like a witch.”
Loki looked down at himself. He’d foregone the glamoured clothes he’d been wearing and purchased an actual suit on the way here to save energy—all black, complete with a tiny dark pin through the necktie and the highest-heeled boots that Paxton’s had for men—disappointingly quite low. “Thank you.”
“Witches are girls.”
“Does that make it less of a compliment?”
The man snorted—though not in a shared-joke sort of way. “Next show’s still ten bob,” he said, eyeing Loki head to toe. “Even if you put a hex on me, witch boy.”
Loki was tempted, but he resisted. “Could you send a message to her?” he asked. The man didn’t say no, so Loki pressed on, “Will you tell her that her Trickster is here to see her?”
“Her trickster?” the man repeated, his emphasis much heavier than Loki’s had been.
“Well no, not hers. Not...” Even if he couldn’t feel his face getting hot, he would have seen it in the man’s smirk. “The Trickster,” he clarified, then added quickly, “Not that I’m the Trickster. I’m...Can you just tell her? Please?”
“For ten bob I will.”
Loki turned away from the man guarding the doorway to the stage and stalked over to the bar. The man was still spinning on his stool, chanting about plague. He was obviously drunk, but his shoes were well shined and his hair evenly cut. Perhaps not a rich man, but one with enough means to get very drunk off the plague. Loki resisted rolling his eyes, then pulled his tie slightly askew and reluctantly ruffled his hair, before stumbling over to the man and grabbing on to him.
The man almost tipped off his stool. “Whoa, mate.”
“Can you buy me a drink?” Loki slurred.
“Ah piss off.” The man leaned into his own glass, but Loki clung to him, leaning in close and lacing his voice with the honeyed magical compulsion. “I need ten bob for a drink, mate, I’ve just lost my job, and my wife’s died, and all my seven children have measles, and we’ve got so little for food I’m afraid we may have to eat one of the children—”
“All right, all right!” The man looked more than a bit alarmed as he jerked away from Loki, then fished in his pocket until he came out with a handful of coins. “There.” He shoved them at Loki. “Get your drink and let me alone.”
“Cheers.” Loki turned, readjusted his tie, then returned to the man guarding the doorway and dumped the coins into his hands.
If the man had witnessed the means by which Loki obtained the coins, he was too busy counting them out to say anything. Once he had pocketed them with a grunt, he looked up. “You’re lucky.”
“Am I?” Loki asked.
The man nodded at the drunk at the bar. “He’s a boxer. I’ve seen him knock out men twice your size.”
“Is that so?”
“Must have been a pretty good hex, witch boy.”
“Must have been,” Loki replied.
Behind the curtain, the dark room was a tiered semicircular theatre. The stage below was mostly taken up by a circular table, painted black and with a board in the center displaying the Midgardian alphabet written in gold. The attendees filed into the chairs around the perimeter, most of them in black so that they blended into the dark fabric swooping from the ceiling and walls. The air in the room was already thick and smoky. Trays of incense hung on either side of the doorway, and as he ushered people in, the doorman dropped another match on each, sending even more heavily perfumed smoke billowing into the air. Loki swallowed a cough. Perhaps the Midgardians found these smells pleasant and calming, but they felt like an assault upon his senses.
He took a seat near the back, very aware that his heart was beating too fast. With each person who passed through the dark curtain, a small cloud of dust rose from the
velvet. Loki looked around, trying to make out shapes through the darkness, but the room seemed to be designed to make its occupants feel stifled, stuffed into a space too small for them. Perhaps it was meant to make you feel like you were in a coffin.
“Good evening,” said a voice from the stage. A woman on Loki’s right shrieked and grabbed his arm. She had to be shaken loose like an insect before she seemed to remember that her husband was on her other side and she’d rather cling to him than a stranger.
“Welcome to the Inferno,” the voice said, smooth as honey and absent London’s guttural vowels and hard edges. The way she spoke felt balanced, every syllable in its purest form. Loki felt a shiver go through him. “I am the Enchantress. I will be guiding you tonight as we connect to the world beyond ours.”
A woman stepped into the circle of pale light from the colored glass lamp hanging over the table. Her face was veiled, the dark shroud obscuring her features too heavily to know if it was her. Loki leaned forward in his seat, like he could somehow draw close enough to see beyond that opaque veil. The voice was slick as silk, deep and resounding, but it was too put-on to recognize if it was her or not.
It had to be her.
It couldn’t be her.
The Enchantress sat upon a chair before the table, the many rings upon her fingers clanking together. They flashed, though there didn’t seem to be enough light to truly catch them. “The truth of this cosmos is known to me, in a way few on Earth know it. The veils that hang between realms are as thin as paper. My connection to the otherworldly is real, and powerful, and beyond the understanding of most humans,” she continued. “And if you approach tonight’s session with an open mind and a willingness to accept that the truth often extends beyond our understanding and imagination, you will tonight, in this very room, hear and see things that may seem inexplicable but are simply beyond your small minds. And yet this does not mean they are not as real as you and I.”
In the first row, a woman was already crying. The man beside her pushed her head into his coat, trying to look as though he was comforting her but likely trying to stifle her sobs. He gave the Enchantress an apologetic smile. “She’s very emotional.”
“You say that like it is a weakness,” the Enchantress replied. “It is not weakness to be soft. It means you are open. You are sensitive to the movements of the universe in a way that others are not. What is your name, darling?”
“Žydr·e Matulis,” the woman replied, her heavy accent furthered muddled by her sobs.
“Join me on the stage, won’t you? Both of you.” She held out a hand. Žydr·e and her husband climbed the short stairway holding hands, then stood awkwardly at the fringes of the gaslights casting a dim sheen over the stage until the Enchantress gestured them to two chairs at the table. “Whom is it you seek?” she asked Žydr·e, fanning her skirts around her knees for maximum aesthetic effect.
“Our daughter,” Žydr·e said. “Our daughter Molly Rose. She’s one of the dead in the Southwark morgue.”
“The living dead,” the Enchantress murmured, and a collective shiver of fear seemed to pass through the room. “Tell me when she died.”
“Two weeks past,” Žydr·e replied. “We want to bury her, but they say...A man at the coroner’s office told us she might not be dead. It might be that none of them are. We were hoping if you could find her spirit, she could tell us.”
“Of course, of course.” The Enchantress turned to the assembled crowd. “Might I call upon several more volunteers who might lend their energies to myself and these two grieving parents?” Her head swiveled slowly over the assembled crowd. Several people raised their hands, and she pointed at random with a long finger encased in black lace. Loki didn’t dare move. He didn’t want to raise his hand, didn’t want to do anything to feed this wild hope inside him. Any movement felt like a bet he wasn’t certain he’d win.
But then she froze with her face toward him. Though he couldn’t see her eyes, Loki felt them on him. He felt pinned, examined, his skin on fire in a way it had only ever felt in a single gaze.
Then she extended a hand to him. “Join us, won’t you, sir?”
It couldn’t be her.
She reached up and pushed her veil off her face—just for a moment—and he saw a flash of her deep green eyes.
It was Amora.
He stood—his legs were trembling, why was he trembling?—and walked to the stage.
The Enchantress called up several more audience members until every chair around the table was full. Loki took the spot across from her, suddenly too aware of his skin, his breath, the way his hair fell around his face. He swore he could feel the warmth off her skin, or perhaps that was just his own burning from its proximity to hers. Its first proximity in years.
Žydr·e was still crying, and she reached out, grabbing one of Amora’s webbed sleeves. “I have a lock of her hair—” she began, but Amora held up a hand, turning away from her.
She did not say a word as she assembled four candles in the center of the table and lit them, one at each corner of the painted letters, then placed a planchette with a cutout center on top of the letter board. “The spirits do not speak to our earthly whims,” she said to Žydr·e without looking at her. “Your daughter will not be reached right now. Instead they urge me toward...this man.” She turned to Loki, her veil parting to reveal a single dark eye, and she opened her hands to him. “They wish to speak to you.”
He swallowed. “I have much I’d like to ask them, too.”
“Then take my hands.”
Loki stretched his and took hers across the table. Beneath their linked fingers, the planchette over the lettered board began to spin. Žydr·e gasped, clutching her husband’s arm and crying harder.
The planchette flew from one corner of the board to the other, pausing over the top of the word HELLO painted in one corner before darting in a frantic scrabble over the alphabet, spelling out words.
“Spirits!” another man at the table cried, his voice wobbly. “They’re here!”
“What do they say?” Žydr·e’s husband asked.
HELLOPRINCE.
“Prince?” Amora repeated with surprise, like it wasn’t her making the planchette move. Loki wasn’t certain how, but he knew she was doing it. It couldn’t be magic—she’d been gone from Asgard so long that she surely wouldn’t have strength to waste on tricks like these. “Your surname?” she asked, and the corner of her mouth turned up in a cheeky smile. “Or do we have royalty with us tonight?” A few nervous titters from the audience. “What is your first question, my dear prince?”
He stared at her, the glimmering green of her eyes beneath her veil. What could he say? Even without an audience of humans witnessing their reunion, what could he possibly say to the person who meant the most to him? The person he thought he’d lost long ago?
“How?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
The planchette began to move on the board, tracing out its answer: MAGIC.
When he looked at her, she was smiling, the tilted smirk like a crescent moon.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, the words leaving him in a breath.
She tapped a finger against the back of his hand. “That’s not a question.”
“Have you missed me?”
She tipped her chin toward the board, as the planchette spun.
EVERYDAY.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
The planchette whizzed. HIDING.
“A last question?” she asked.
“Did you think I’d find you?” he asked.
“Oh, my darling,” he heard her whisper, the words nearly lost under the scratch of the planchette across the letters.
INEVERDOUBTED.
When the show ended, as everyone around the table stood and the rest of the guests returned to the audience, Loki felt Amora slide her hand into his once more, pulling him toward the wings of the stage.
“I haven’t long,” she whispered, and he felt her breath against his ear. �
��Come with me.”
He followed, feeling the soft rustle of the curtains as they passed backstage. She led him down a narrow brick hallway lined with ropes and pulleys, then through a side door into what must have been her dressing room. It was dark, the fire in the grate reduced to pale cinders, and the walls were lined with mirrors, their edges foggy and cracked. The counters in front of them were covered in cosmetics, thick paints and brushes in disarray. A pot of powder had tipped over, spraying its sparkling contents into a shape like a bullet hitting snow.
Amora shut the door, then turned to Loki, ripping off her veil so that her hair tumbled out of its fastenings and down her back. “Loki,” she said, and he didn’t know what to say in return. Even her name would have felt like too much. He couldn’t make his limbs move, so she came to him, pressed her hands to either side of his face as she stared into it. “I can’t believe it.”
“Amora.” And finally he found himself again. He opened his arms and when she fell into them, he could remember no words, no sound, nothing in the Nine Realms but her name. The smell of her hair. The feeling of her pressed up against him. He had not realized the depths of his missing her until she was here with him again.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her face against his shoulder.
“I’m on an assignment from my father.”
“An assignment? That sounds very official. Kingly, even.” She wrapped her arms around his neck, leaning back to peer into his face. “Did I call you by the wrong title? Should it have been King Loki—still believable.”
He didn’t want to tell her. He didn’t want to talk about Asgard yet. He knew everything about what had happened between him and his father since Amora was banished—he wanted to know everything about her.