Stormbringer

by Alis Franklin

  And now it was Sigmund’s, and Sigmund was alone.

  “Hnnurgh!”

  Sitting up was almost worse than lying down, but only just. A glass of water and a torn-off silver blister pack of Advil stared back at Sigmund from the nightstand. He returned the expression for a moment, then drank the water, leaving the pills behind.

  Even with his brain trying to claw its way out via his eyeballs, it still took Sigmund until halfway to the bathroom to realize he was hungover. That was new. New and unwanted. Definitely unwanted.

  He’d had a lot to drink last night. A lot. Sigmund had never really considered himself much of a drinker, and especially not a drinker of wine. It’d always tasted a bit the same before, sort of like kerosene mixed with wood chips. Last night it’d occurred to Sigmund, some time between the third course and the fifth, that maybe he just hadn’t been drinking the right sort.

  In the bathroom, the reflection in the mirror was the one he’d always remembered. Brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair. Overweight, under-shaved, forgettable in every detail.

  Except that somewhere, beneath the surface, lurked the soul of a long-dead goddess. Sigyn, the Victorious. Wife of Loki and reshaper of Ragnarøkkr. She was quiet this morning—hiding from the hangover, maybe—but if he closed his eyes and felt, Sigmund could find her. An ice-cold core of certainty lurking down beneath the postadolescent anxiety and mishmashed pop culture.

  When he opened his eyes again, all Sigmund saw was Sigmund. So he pulled off his T-shirt and kicked off his boxers, turning on the shower and stepping in under the ludicrously oversized spray. Like standing in the middle of a hot, soapy rainstorm, the smell of sandalwood and citrus exploding out from the sort of shampoo that came from shops selling that and nothing else.

  With his eyes closed in the heat, Sigmund felt his headache receding, just a little. He stood there for far too long, waiting for the water to go cold and knowing that it wouldn’t. Back at home—at Dad’s home—Sigmund would get twenty minutes in the shower, tops, before the spray turned to ice. At Lain’s place—at Sigmund’s new place—luxury was indefinite, an endless waterfall delivered at perfect temperatures and perfect pressure, all controlled by nothing so gauche as taps but rather a large touchscreen panel set into the wall just beyond the glass. Sigmund’s perfect shower was already set and stored and fav’d, ready to be recalled with the touch of a single button.

  Sigmund’s new life. Welcome to it.

  Shower, toothbrush, hairbrush, shave. Afterward, the face in the mirror looked damper and less hungover, but otherwise unchanged.

  Sigmund’s clothes were still heaped in haphazard piles in the walk-in, upended from plastic storage tubs and washing baskets since repurposed to carry comic books and video games. Remnants of a dozen trips back and forth, picking up Sigmund’s life from one place and shifting it to another. He dug around in the piles, finding an old pair of jeans and a caffeine molecule T-shirt hidden beneath the beige slacks and button-down shirt Sigmund had worn exactly once, exactly one lifetime ago.

  Last December, at his dad’s behest, Sigmund had worn those clothes to the LB office Christmas party. That’d been the start of it, all the gods and all the madness. The first time Sigmund had met Lain, in his guise as Travis Hale.

  The jacket Travis had been wearing that night was hanging up not two feet away. Tucked between bespoke three-piece suits and a cascade of designer scarves. Sigmund ran his hand along the fabrics, then made his way out of the bedroom, heading down the stairs and to the kitchen. A large Mondaine wall clock told Sigmund he was late for work. As he rummaged through the breadbox, it occurred to him he didn’t care.

  The bread was handmade, the toaster lacquered red. Sigmund found jams in the cupboard, labeled with brown paper, with strange combinations of fruit he’d never heard of. He picked something red. It wasn’t strawberry, but it’d do.

  The toast popped, he put it on a plate, grabbed a knife from the drawer, opened the jam, plunged the knife in and

  (carved wood beneath his hands and fear curling in his heart, the smell of blood and burning, the sound of cracking tiles as, across the foyer, the gods themselves battled for the fate of all the world, slamming one another into the ground again and again and again, rage and fear and loathing, a thousand years of agony bursting forth into this one and final fight that raged on and on just beyond Sigmund’s grasp but not beyond the bitter tooth of the spear he held within his hands, the spear he took and raised and plunged through Baldr’s heart, through blood and bone, Sigmund’s hands that were not his hands, guided by something ancient and terrible and victorious, and Baldr-who-was-not, skewered through and lunging toward Lain and)

  somehow, Sigmund was on the floor. He was on the floor, and the knife was on the floor, and so was a big long smear of

  (blood)

  hipster jam. All across the big white tiles, all up the shiny brown vinyl kitchen cupboards.

  “S-shit. Shit. Shit sh-shit shit . . .”

  Two months ago, Sigmund killed a man. Now he lived in a multimillion-dollar penthouse with that man’s ghost, curled up shaking and crying in a jam-smeared kitchen.

  “J-Jesus. Fuck.”

  Sigmund’s voice echoed through the emptiness, bounced back at him in time to the ticking of a railway clock. Alone, all alone. Because Lain had to do business and Dad was elsewhere and that left just Sigmund, fending for himself like the adult that he was. Which meant cleaning up the kitchen and getting to work. Not huddled here, trembling, because the drip, drip, drip of the jam from the counter looked like—

  Like—

  Like something else entirely.

  Slowly, Sigmund pushed himself up the wall and off the floor. Slowly.

  It took him a few tries, but he got there in the end.

  He got to work, too. In the end.

  It wasn’t a long walk from Lain’s—from their apartment. Maybe ten minutes, across Torr Mall and Osko Park, beneath the three huge stones that loomed, ominous and ancient, in front of LB HQ.

  When he’d been a kid, Sigmund used to play games around those stones, racing his dad to the base. Later, as an adult, it’d become a meeting place for Sigmund and his friends, standing around holding coffees.

  Now Sigmund could barely look at the bloody things. Not without hearing the echoes of a scream behind his ears, the not-quite scent of piss and shit and rot clinging to his nostrils.

  Those stones hadn’t always been Lokabrenna’s logo. They used to be a prison, the groove in the top worn down by Loki’s withered body, the holes threaded through with the guts of his son, turned to iron and rubbing ugly raw bands across his chest and hips and ankles. Poison dripping from a snake, suspended somewhere up above, the only succor a single stone bowl, held for a thousand years by Sigyn’s patient hand.

  Here, now, in the present, Sigmund ducked his head and hurried into the foyer.

  Not that inside was much better. The blood had been bleached out and the tiles replaced, but Sigmund could still feel the battle. Some burnt-out malaise that clung to the back of his throat, guilt and pain and blood.

  He’d killed a man. Right there, where the grout gleamed bright and new. Sigmund could feel rune-carved wood beneath his palms. The weight of it. The slight resistance as it popped through Baldr’s skin and—

  And people were staring. Sigmund was gulping air like a racehorse on Everest, and people were staring.

  (breathe in, two, three, breathe out, two, three, breath in, two, three, breathe)

  It wasn’t like he hadn’t walked across the foyer with Lain since the . . . since everything. Lain, who was a little bit Baldr and a little bit Loki, but was mostly himself, loved Sigmund with all the fire of the sun. Sigmund had killed Lain twice over and Lain thought of it as a favor, cracking jokes about his black heart and his gold heart, grinning his too-sharp grin as madness warred behind his poison eyes.

  He didn’t blame Sigmund for what happened. So why was Sigmund blaming himself?

  (there’d been bones.
ribs. the spear shuddering as it)

  The elevator chimed, and Sigmund stepped out.

  So this was Sigmund’s life, now. Gods and blood and death. And then this, the LB IT Basement, located on the seventh floor. Just sunlight and the lush green of living walls. Rows of neat cubicles decorated with lines of Nintendo figurines, frozen in vignettes along the partitions. The hum of computers and the buzz of conversation, and desktop wallpapers showing square-jawed grizzled men holding oversized weapons, standing proudly in front of shrapnel and explosions.

  Sigmund’s cubicle was located down the end of a row, between the window and an empty desk that had, briefly, belonged to Lain. The official story was that Lain had transferred somewhere upstairs, into one of the business departments. A nice, vague fiction, designed around Sigmund and his inability to lie. “Lain” had gone upstairs, and he did do business. And if no one asked for more than that, Sigmund wouldn’t have to tell them that upstairs meant the CEO’s office, and business meant running the company as Travis Hale.

  Lain may have been a front, but he still came down to visit.

  The morning was agony.

  Sigmund spent it staring at his monitor with glassy eyes, trying to think through the pounding in his head and wishing desperately he’d downed the Advil.

  The work queue mocked him. The same mindless tasks he’d been doing his entire adult life, mailboxes and profiles and passwords, and for the first time ever Sigmund didn’t know how to close a single one. At nine thirty-six, Divya started up a support call, too-loud, too-shrill voice using too many words to explain too few things, bouncing off the roof tiles and straight into what was left of Sigmund’s fractured nerves. Headphones blocked the sound but made his skull pound, and by nine-forty-eight Sigmund’s head was in his hands, bowed over his keyboard, trying not to shake or cry or scream without even knowing why.

  Fuck. What was wrong with him?

  He needed Lain. Things had been okay with Lain around. Because Sigmund would start to shake or blank or tear up, and suddenly Lain would be there, all bright and grinning, wanting to go get food or make out or play Mario Kart. And it was okay, with Lain around, because even if Sigmund could still smell the stink of melting tiles, could still feel the slick slide of Gungnir as it pierced into—

  Christ. Christ, he was a mess. He was a mess, and Lain wasn’t here, and it was only ten oh-four, but Sigmund couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit here and give a shit about mailbox-fucking-restores when he’d crawled through the roots of the World Tree and killed a god with his own hands. And what was enduring Divya’s shrieking and Boogs’s coughing to someone who’d tasted the ash of Múspell on his tongue?

  Sigmund was a goddess, for fuck’s sake. Or at least he had been, once. So what the bloody hell was he doing having a panic attack in his fucking cubicle?

  No one looked up when Sigmund stood, nor tried to stop him on the way to the elevators. At the doors, he swiped the White Card against the reader. Not his usual pass card, the one with his name and photo that got him in on the ground floor. The White Card was something else, blank and unadorned, a gift from Lain that would take Sigmund up to the CEO’s suite, miles and miles above.

  Sigmund made it all the way up without seeing a single soul. Not even Nicole Arin, company VP and god in her own right, whose office shared the top floor. Her doors were closed when Sigmund passed, and stayed that way when he pushed against the brass LB logo on Travis’s.

  As befitting a CEO, Travis’s office was wonderful. A huge, quiet space in front of an enormous plate-glass window, looking out over the city. Sigmund threw himself into Travis’s oversized chair, spinning around to face the view and trying to get his twitching hands back under control. They wouldn’t stop clenching, itching in some way. Like they wanted to gouge or choke or shake.

  Sigmund let them flex, feeling something within him calm as his eyes blinked against the sunlight glinting off the lake. Or traced the distant curve of the mountains. The sun was bright, the sky was blue . . . and things were all right. They were. Really. All right. Travis’s chair smelled like him, smelled like Lain. All woodsmoke and loam, and it wasn’t Lain himself, but it was close. Close enough.

  (okay . . . I’m okay)

  Sigmund’s eyes fluttered shut and he sat there, long enough to feel the stillness settle back into his life.

  (shit happens, it happened . . . but I’m okay)

  His eyes only opened to the feel of pressure and weight against his leg. When Sigmund looked, he saw the dark coils of an enormous snake.

  “Hey, Boots.” Sigmund bent down, extending his hands and picking the snake up, draping her across his shoulders. Once upon a time, Boots had spent a thousand years dripping poison on a god. Now she lived in a huge, glass-free tank in said god’s mortal office.

  “I’m all right,” Sigmund told her. She was a good snake, and he wouldn’t want her worrying. “I’m just . . . things are a bit . . .” But that road didn’t go anywhere he could think to travel.

  Boots, being a snake, said nothing in reply.

  Sigmund spent the rest of the morning in Travis’s office, playing video games on the couch. Travis’s TV was huge and, more important, it was connected to a prototype alpha of the next gen Inferno console. Sigmund convinced himself playing it was testing. For the good of the company.

  He was sure Travis wouldn’t mind.

  For her part, Boots stayed wrapped around his shoulders, half dozing, half hissing at the screen whenever Sigmund died or the console crashed. And if the former happened more than the latter? Well. The only witness was a snake. It wasn’t like she could tell anyone.

  Then, sometime just before lunch, Sigmund found himself saying:

  “I mean, they’re not bad people, y’know? Still the same gang they were before.” He fiddled with the Inferno’s controller, watching as, on-screen, his overarmored space marine ran in listless circles. “I mean, Divya’s still a pain, but that’s not really her fault. I guess.”

  Boots gave what Sigmund took to be a sympathetic hiss.

  “It’s just . . . They’re all so—so normal. How’m I supposed to, like, relate to them anymore? Over beers at the Temple or whatever. What’m I supposed to do? Swap stories about the funny time Lain got his horns tangled up in the washing line?” Sigmund grinned, though it faded quickly. “’Cause, like. That was pretty funny. But not exactly something I can share with the rest of the Basement, y’know?”

  On the TV, Sigmund’s marine scratched his ass in eighty-inch HD.

  “It’s not everyone else that’s changed,” he said. “It’s me. I have this thing now, this . . . this secret.” Even if it wasn’t really a secret, at least according to Lain. Mortals don’t see the Wyrd, he’d always say. It’s not like on TV.

  Or in books, even. Because Harry Potter had never prepared Sigmund for this. Had never mentioned what he was supposed to do, when the letter came from Hogwarts, but his family wasn’t a bunch of dicks. How he was supposed to manage fitting back into the Muggle world between school terms, the place where cars didn’t fly and no one could throw fireballs with their thoughts?

  Then again, Sigmund had never read beyond the fourth book. Maybe they dealt with it later.

  Maybe not. Maybe that was the trick, as Lain would say. There was no going home.

  Sigmund gunned down a few more aliens, running between stacks of conveniently placed crates. An ill-timed sidestep landed him face-first on a frag grenade, and as the screen faded red, then black, Sigmund had to admit his heart just wasn’t in it.

  The aliens looked a bit like Lain. Tall and dark-skinned, with big claws and glowing eyes. Lain would hate the comparison, but once Sigmund had seen it, the mindless violence of their murder somehow lost its, well. Mindlessness.

  “Fuck.” Sigmund sighed, flopping his arms out and his head backward on the sofa, Boots a long, firm bolster beneath his neck.

  He stayed like that for a while, staring at the ceiling, listening to the death screen’s music loop on the TV. Ev
entually, Boots’s face appeared in his vision, her long, dark tongue flicking out across his nose and cheek. It tickled, and Sigmund laughed, rolling up and away to escape.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I get it. No more moping. Fuck . . .” But he was laughing.

  It was a start.

  At twelve thirty-six, he got a text from Em:

  › Where are you bro?

  Then, before Sigmund had even started typing his reply:

  › Meet us at Wayne’s in 10.

  Sigmund’s best friends, Em and Wayne, former valkyries and current goths. Wayne was over six feet tall, made of muscle and cleavage and clothes that would make a postapocalyptic Disney princess weep. Em was about Sigmund’s height and weight, and wore the kind of pants that clinked when she walked. She also, between the hours of eight a.m. and four p.m., worked across the floor from Sigmund. Wayne, meanwhile, worked shifts at a comic store in between studying.

  Both Em and Wayne had been to Hel and back for Sigmund. Literally. Twice. Which meant he wasn’t going to ignore Em’s order to meet up for lunch.

  So he ditched Boots with a, “Sorry man, gotta go!” Then made his way out of the office.

  Wayne’s comic shop wasn’t far, across the road and through the park. Down Torr Row and into Diamond Square. Metaverse Book and Comic [sic], wide and open and brightly lit, filled with neat shelves of trades and neat boxes of back issues, decorated by T-shirts and action figures.

  Sigmund had been fourteen the first time he’d stepped into a comic store, trailing along behind a determined Em. Back in those days, the place had been a dingy hole-in-the-wall filled with dust and cobwebs. Sometime between then and now, comics had gone mainstream.

  “Sig! Over here!”

  Wayne, her dark-skinned face grinning beneath an explosion of pink synthetic dreadlocks. She was gesturing to the back of the shop, through the staff door, so Sigmund followed her. Out into a chaos of books and boxes, and Em, sitting on a milk crate and scowling.