“Yes?”
He gasps laughter and tells me I’m awful, then he’s pushing me away. Not far, just enough to grab my hand and drag me down the short hallway to a door. It has a poster tacked to the outside. It’s a picture of a dragon.
He turns to make a joke about the poster, but I’m not hungry for self-depreciation anymore. I want lust, and heat, and desire. A roaring inferno looking for new wood to burn and burn I will, until all that’s left is coal and ash.
Sigmund fumbles for the door handle as we kiss, his mind swirling with every filthy thing we could be doing and all the time we don’t have in which to do them.
The door opens.
I freeze.
Ultimately, it’s not the video game posters or the Star Wars curtains or the entire wall of fantasy paperbacks that get me. It’s the bed.
It has ribs protruding through the mattress.
“Um…” Sigmund has turned as well, spurred on by my sudden change in mood. When he catches sight of his bedroom, he becomes a slicing whirl of ice and fear in my arms.
In the middle of the bones is a box. Just a brown, slightly battered cardboard box, except the bottom of it is stained a horrid reddish purple.
I know what’s in that box. I haven’t opened it, and I still know.
He’s still here, in the house. I can feel the edge of him, moving downstairs, and I don’t know whether he meant me to feel it or if he’s just careless, thinking that the box will keep me distracted. Except I’m not distracted, far from it. I’m furious.
I’m also out the door and down the stairs before Sigmund can call my name. My tattoos burn but I tear through them, not thinking of David or of dinner or of being good and making nice. Right now I’m thinking of blood and fire and that fucker killed my fucking daughter and I am going to rip his fucking head off, too.
Baldr is in the kitchen. Remember that thing about the níð and assuming Baldr wouldn’t go after David? Well, turns out I was wrong. Fortunately, I’m just-in-time wrong, and the tip of Baldr’s (new) spear only grazes David’s throat as I throw myself against the homicidal bastard.
We crash through the sliding doors and into the dining room table, which cracks a bit but doesn’t break.
I’m saying something like, “Fucking die you fucking motherfucker!” while I try and slam Baldr’s head through the wood. I can hear two voices scream behind me, but I’m not interested in that.
I’m interested in pain.
In between beatings, Baldr lets out a broken gurgle and starts laughing. The sound is wet and wheezing—his nose is currently smashed across his face—but the incongruity of it throws me. Just a bit.
This pause, as it turns out, is enough for Baldr to throw me in turn, and he does. Back through the smashed doors and skidding along the kitchen floor on my tail, Sigmund and David lunging sideways out of my path.
When the momentum goes, I roll up into a crouch. Baldr is stalking toward me, not in any hurry, the point of his spear digging a long groove in the Sussmans’ hardwood floors.
“How does it feel, boy?” he says in Godstongue. “To watch your family suffer? To die?”
My stitches pull as my teeth show, my next words a rough and tangled snarl. “Fuck you. I didn’t kill your father. He killed us. He doomed us all, chasing power, chasing prophecies.” Only the proud and foolish mess with the Wyrd. The Wyrd messes back.
And, the thing is, Baldr surprises me by saying: “I know.” He sneers, coming to a stop a few feet away. “I speak of others. My children.”
His what? I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about: Baldr has one son but the guy’s fine, far as I know.
I don’t get to say as much, instead having to roll sideways to avoid another downward thrust of his spear. It looks like talking time is over. So we fight.
It’s easier this time. Much easier. My claws and my skin and my strength feel like my own, so I use them, throwing myself at Baldr with bloodlust and with violence. I can tell he feels it. His eyes go wide and he stumbles, retreating into the shattered dining room, trying to retake the offensive, looking for an opening.
I don’t give him one, all teeth and fire and fury, and the world burns in my rage. Rage at this child, this boy, who would dare come into the realm I’ve built, this sanctuary I’ve made, and defile my home and murder my family.
I leap, and Baldr calls down the sun, an inferno of light that blinds even the Wyrdsight. I howl but, midair, there’s little I can do and, when I land, it’s not Baldr’s flesh beneath my claws but the leather and stuffing of the Sussmans’ couch. A moment later, pain lances my gut as Baldr’s spear pierces through, pinning me to the furniture. Something in my spine snaps as a knee drives into the small of my back, Baldr’s weight pressing down as he leans over me and says, “You spoiled, coal-biting brat! I will relish your destruction, taking you apart piece by piece for every life you’ve ruined.”
His breath ruffles my feathers, his face very close, and the crunch is satisfying when I whip my skull backward and my occipital bone makes friends with his broken nose. He grunts, stumbling back, and I feel the metal of the spear slide out of my flesh. I fall to the carpet, which is about as much as I can manage, and am busy trying to get my legs to work when a heavy boot makes itself acquainted with my injured stomach.
When I cough, I cough up blood, the purple-green globs hissing as they burn holes into the carpet.
“Tssch,” I hear. “Even your insides are filth.”
Then fingers are winding through the feathers on my head, wrenching me upright, Baldr’s free hand hovering near the wound in my gut with a heat even I can feel.
Baldr’s not a sun god. Not exactly. But the associations—death and rebirth, the cycle of days and seasons—is close enough from him to draw it down, and I bite back a howl as agony lances through my skin.
I lash out the only way I can think of, by setting my entire self ablaze. I feel Baldr’s hand free itself from my hair, and I roll forward, across the carpet, desperate for distance. I end up behind the recliner, and a quick glance down at my abdomen reveals not a charred and bleeding mess but clean unblemished skin.
Baldr healed me.
The blood. It has to be the blood. He can’t get it on him, and the wound was dangerous. I can use that. I have to use it.
First, I have to get in close. This doesn’t prove difficult when, in the next instant, Baldr is upon me once again. I’m ready for it, sort of, standing on unsteady legs, claws catching the haft of the spear he’s using more like a quarterstaff, now the point has corroded away.
I push back with the staff-come-spear even as Baldr tries to crush the length of it against my throat. I’m strong, but he’s stronger—feral, somehow, and desperate in a way he wasn’t, last we fought—and step by agonizing step he drives me backward. Until my shoulders are up against the wall, the impact knocking free a picture of Sigmund dressed up for some childhood play.
Baldr’s loathing is a living thing, a roiling supernova of pain and loss. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand him, this twisted black hole so unlike the shining star he used to be.
The haft of the spear presses against my throat, the muscles in my own arms screaming as I try to hold it back. If I let go, I wonder if the force will take my head.
Voice rough and rasping, I manage to bite out, “If you cut me, my blood will melt the flesh right off your bones.” Behind me, flames begin to lick the walls. I’m not sure if they’re mine or Baldr’s.
“Not if I burn you first,” Baldr snarls.
“Burn fire? I don’t think so.” It’s hard to speak around the spear.
“You may have the flame, boy,” Baldr says. “But I am the sun. Now burn!” Around me, the heat begins to rise. This time, I don’t think it’s going to heal.
And so, Baldr’s breath wet against my cheek, I let go of the spear.
The next part isn’t fun; the wood crushes down against my neck, and I feel it. Feel as my throat collapses, esophagus and larynx. Feel
cartilage crumble, feel flesh rupture.
Feel the blood, filling up my mouth, over my tongue and held behind my teeth.
Then I lunge forward. And bite.
Bite down hard against Baldr’s eye, the same I once shot through a thousand lifetimes ago. A death scar, a mark, regrown now but it’s still mine and I take it back. Poison-coated teeth sinking into soft flesh and scraping bone, then the barest of resistance before a sound like the dawn and my mouth is filled with the taste of—
(watch him, strange and alien, across the fields of Ásgarðr and wonder, wonder what father saw in something so different, one who plays at being one of you he does and he is oh so very good but still you know you feel he is so different he can only be—)
(the others laugh they play their games throwing rocks and stones and other things and you laugh too though not so hard, not so carefree as once before because mother made them promise made them all but the dreams still come though you tell no one, dreams and nightmares and behind every end and every death you see—)
(oh, oh brother, oh poor blind brother you were so alone wanting something getting nothing, nothing from your brother beloved by all and so you make a deal, just a game, just an afternoon, but his deal is death the price too high and as you see the arrow you see your brother and behind him the twisted smile of—)
(it’s cold, cold and dark for so long oh so long and you can’t do this you need the sun you are the sun but down here there’s nothing nothing but mist and misery and her and even she belongs to—)
(it is done the end of all things has come and gone and you are free, free but something’s wrong, reborn yet still so dead inside, something you can’t see can’t find so you send out your eye only one now but it is sharp and oh it takes an age but finally you find—)
(father oh father you brought the viper to our breast this monster and even now we pay the price and that price has the name—)
“Lain?”
Pain. Pain and memories, so many memories. Flashes of color, of light. Of hate. They fade, and there’s a sound outside so I open my eyes and see—
“Hórkona!”
My fingers close around her neck before she can open her traitorous mouth. Her eyes go wide and she tries to plead, tries to call a name but it is not my name, it is his and she has betrayed me to him and so she will pay.
“L-Lain? Lain! Loki!”
Ah. That does it.
My hand jerks open and Sigmund crumples to the floor, clutching his neck and breathing hard. Loki. Right. Fuck. That’s me, that’s my name, I bit out Baldr’s eye and, fuck, that’s old magic, deep magic and I nearly lost myself but I’m back, I think, almost back and all it took was nearly killing my wife to get him to finally, finally, say my name.
About now—just a fraction of a moment of a second, really—the world explodes in pain, and everything goes black.
I can hear Sigmund screaming out, No, Dad, stop, it’s okay please don’t! I can smell blood and ash and fear. And I can feel, even though I wish I couldn’t. Bone-deep pain ringing through my skull and behind my eyeballs and down into my teeth. But I can’t see, not with my eyes, and not with the Wyrd.
It’s the horns. I’ve been hit over the back of the head and it’s clipped my horns. Jötunn horns. They’re not for fighting. They are, as they say, for Display Purposes Only. Display and sensing, the heart of a jötunn’s Wyrdsight, and without them? Without them I really am blind.
I feel cool hands against my shoulders and, unseeing, I jerk back. But the hands are gentle and familiar and so is the voice that says, “Ohmigod, are you okay?”
I blink, the ringing in my horns is fading and I can start to make out the blurry outlines of Sigmund’s narrative, of David’s.
David is clutching an iron poker he took from the fireplace, having just hit me over the head with it. He’s been dissuaded from further actions along this line by his son, though he’s currently reserving judgment on the issue. I did, after all, nearly just strangle his only child.
Sigmund is still trying to get some kind of response, so I groan and half uncurl from where I’ve rolled into a ball on the floor.
“ ’M okay,” I manage to slur, throat already healing but still raw and shattered. Cool, soft hands help me sit up and the world comes back into focus. Or whatever passes for focus with the Wyrdsight. Mostly. I run a hand across my horns, checking for damage and wincing when my fingers encounter a rough edge.
“The left one’s missing a chunk off the end,” Sigmund says, meaning his left. “Dad whacked you one good.”
“Fuck. You’re not wrong.” Hence the fuzziness in the Sight. Damn. “Where’s Baldr?” I look around, directing sightless eyes mostly out of habit. I know he’s not here, and all moving my head does is exacerbate the pain.
Sigmund looks, too, as if expecting Baldr to leap out from behind the sofa. Well, what’s left of it beneath the ash. “After you, uh”—he makes an awkward sort of hand gesture indicating bit out his eye like a fucking monster, and I duck my head and wipe my lips and try not to taste vitreous humor in my throat—“he kinda just vanished and actually why was he here in the first place you said he wouldn’t attack my dad and now my dining room is trashed and my house is on fire and my dad nearly died and fucking what the fuck man!” His voice has had some serious turning up of the volume controls by the end of this, not to mention that he starts getting a bit punchy. He’s not hitting hard, but he is angry and scared and I do deserve it.
“Sigmund!” I’ve almost forgotten David is there. He takes a half step forward, still clutching the fire poker, eyeing me in horror.
Me, I just hold up my arms and fall onto my back, making sure to take the fires still burning in the living and dining rooms down with me. The house is a mess. Fuck. What a fucking lousy way to meet your in-laws. “Sorry. Man, I just…Sorry. Fuck.” I don’t know what else to say, but Sigmund stops hitting me so I can’t be doing too badly. He’s still angry, though, and it’s a sharp and jagged taste. Scared and pissed off, wild eyed and breath racing. He’s beautiful.
I say, “I’ll pay for the damage to the house.”
“It’s not about the fucking house, Lain.” Sigmund gives me one more whack on the arm for good measure. I thwack my tail against the floor in response. I know it’s not about the house.
We just sit there for a while. Me staring sightlessly up at the roof, drumming my tail against the carpet, Sigmund kneeling next to me and rubbing his eyes underneath his glasses. I’m halfway through thinking about what the fuck I’m going to do next, when a voice from the corner says, “Would one of you boys mind explaining to your old man what the bloody hell is going on here?”
Ah. Right.
—
An exchange of meaningful looks later, I retreat upstairs to let Sigmund deal with his father. I try not to listen to their harsh murmuring or the burnt-edged emotions that swirl around them, instead feeling out into the house itself. It’s the center of a Bleed that takes up at least an entire block, but it’s not deep in the house itself. For all their problems, the Sussmans are a pretty normal family, and their house is a place of sanctuary and calm for both of them. That makes it hard for the Bleed to get a foothold, which is why about the worst it’s managed to do so far is spread a bit of rising damp up the walls.
There are some exceptions. There’s something under the stairs I don’t want to think about, as well as in David’s study, and the portrait of Mum on the wall in the corridor has started to get a bit difficult to look at. The portrait and the study are linked—Lynne Sussman’s death being one of the turning points in the lives of her son and husband—but the thing under the stairs is just an accident. I don’t think either of them are dangerous, exactly, but they’re both traumas I assume Sigmund and David would rather avoid.
The stairs creak a little when I walk up them, but there’s nothing too horrific waiting for me on the landing. The door to Sigmund’s room is open, and I peer inside. The bed still has its ossified accoutrements,
and now the ceiling has started to grow what look like fleshy stalactites. This kind of sucks. What with my teensy little fear of caves and all, and the fact that the box is still sitting in the middle of the bed.
I manage to grab it via a sequence of artful barrel rolls, and make it back into the hallway just in time to watch the door slam shut with enough force to shake a photo of David and a very young Sigmund off the wall. There’s a pause in the conversation downstairs, and Sigmund’s voice calls, “Lain? You okay?”
If my hearts still worked, they’d be racing. As it is, I just peel myself off the plaster and hope my voice doesn’t shake when I say, “Yeah. All good.”
The downstairs murmuring resumes, and I walk to sit on the edge of the landing, huge hind claws scratching up the stairs, box sitting on my knees.
I open it.
Two minutes later, I close the lid and set fire to the entire thing, then watch the severed head of my daughter burn purple and green in my lap. It takes concentration to keep the fireball contained. That’s good. I need concentration right now. Need focus.
Baldr murdered my daughter to turn my city against me. Without Hel to keep them in check, the mists of Niflhel will creep into the world with the inevitability of the heat death of the universe. Hel’s head is a catalyst for the Bleed, the shrapnel keeping the Wound open. I can burn it to ash but I doubt it’s the only piece, and even if I track down every last one, the damage is already done. Pandemonium is dying, and its convalescence will be long and agonizing.
Baldr can’t beat me in a one-on-one fight in my own city so he’s torn my sanctuary down around me. It’s a move worthy of his father. Of me. Not like the kid at all.
A thousand years in Hel. I wonder what happened to him. I wonder if I care. I wonder if my daughter greeted him with open arms and a skeleton smile before he took her life. Mostly, I wonder how I’m going to end this. My current best plan is still kill Baldr, but, honestly, aside from the sense of vicious satisfaction, I’m not exactly sure how that’s going to help me. Help my city, help my lover and his father and his friends.
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