“I’m curious about the bodies, though,” Saga said with a wide grin. “That’s not common. Of course, they won’t let me anywhere near this stuff once it’s out of the crates, but . . . What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Sally surveyed her surroundings again and looked for something she could make an intelligent statement about.
“Please don’t tell my brothers.” Saga reached for Sally’s hand and gripped it in both of her own. “It’s not like the place would fall apart if I suddenly wasn’t here, but I’d miss it.”
“Thor and Heimdall wouldn’t like this?”
Saga released Sally’s hand and hopped up to sit on one of the sarcophagus crates. Sally found the gesture disrespectful, but she figured that of everyone she knew—immortal and otherwise—Saga had the best appreciation for history and decorum. If she thought it was all right to casually perch atop a thousand-year-old burial box and the body inside, then it must be.
“They might like it fine, as long as they didn’t know I was involved.” Saga patted the empty space beside her, inviting Sally to join. Sally climbed up and let her feet dangle over the side. The container made for a surprisingly comfortable bench.
“They made me quit my job at Powell’s when I was reprimanded for rearranging all the Scandinavian history and culture shelves.” Saga looked down. “After our parents died.”
Sally nodded.
“But they had those books shelved all wrong anyway. It’d been making me nuts for years.” Saga ran her fingers through her dark curls. “But I guess with all the changes and everything, maybe my brothers worried I’d end up spilling the beans about who we really are. They wanted me safely out of the way to mourn in private.”
“But you’re not living at the Lodge.”
Saga’s features melted into a grin. “I have my own place and have promised to do all of my work from home.”
It wasn’t a secret that Saga had started writing steamy romance novels set on the marshes and fjords of her homeland. Sally had read a few, and they were both culturally detailed and graphically passionate.
Sally almost blushed just thinking about them.
“Do you know how long I had to beg my father just to let me take a job at the bookstore?” Saga complained. “Years.”
“Years” probably meant decades or even longer, Sally guessed. It couldn’t have been easy to be under her parents’ thumb for centuries on end. Sally was only beginning to feel her way into her new independence from life at home, and she couldn’t imagine endless ages of rules and curfews.
Except that the end had come.
“Saga.” Sally clasped her hands tightly in her lap. She ignored the tickle in her nose from all the raw wood and packing materials. “I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t know what they were going to do. First Odin wouldn’t let me call for Heimdall and Thor, and then Frigga asked for help alone. The rest of you should have been there, too.”
Sally’s words hung in the air, and Saga remained silent. Sally started to fidget, massaging her fingers and hands. She wondered if her timing was off or if any apology could ever be enough. She pulled her hands apart and moved to slide down off the crate. Saga grabbed her arm.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Saga said. “Someone must have told you that. But maybe you need to hear it from each of us. There’s nothing you could have done to make things go differently. You couldn’t countermand Odin on so much as a dinner order, much less on his final moments in Midgard.”
Sally realized she’d been wringing her hands. When she looked at her fingers, she saw the telltale signs of building static, and her eyes filled with tears.
“Thanks for that,” Sally said quietly.
Saga rested a hand on Sally’s shoulder, then scooted away when she noticed the blue sparks dancing over Sally’s fingers.
“So,” Saga formally changed the topic. “How are things going with Loki?”
Sally rubbed her palms on her thighs. Her skin itched. “That’s a sore point.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
Sally looked up. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Seriously?”
Sally nodded.
“It’s like I said. We’re both trying new things, and while neither one of us is technically a pariah—”
Sally snorted. “That’s not what I heard. Maggie wants Opal instead of me.”
Saga blew out a long breath. “She’s trying to change our traditions. Maybe she thinks with enough determination, she can choose. Even though the Rune Witch is hereditary and unpredictable.”
“Maybe all the rules have changed,” Sally replied. “Nobody seems to know.”
“I need a friend, Sally,” Saga said. “Somebody who understands. There’s so much that’s not wrong, exactly. But different. Weird. New. Heimdall and Thor have their own concerns. And I’m guessing you’re having a pretty rough experience these days, huh?”
Sally’s hands were still sparking and growing painful. She looked around the loading dock for some stone or earth she could use to discharge the excess energy. The walls were probably plaster, which didn’t help, and she wasn’t sure if the concrete floor would ground the energy or send it zinging right back at her. She eyed a forklift parked in a dark corner and shivered at the thought of accidentally burning up its engine if the static detonated. Pale blue light danced with greater urgency over her skin.
Saga patted the crate they were sitting on. “The wood.”
“Won’t that hurt you? Or me?” Sally flexed her fingers as the static sliced at her nerves.
“The wood will absorb it. We won’t feel a thing.”
Sally’s hands felt like they were on fire. She didn’t have time to think about other options. She flattened her palms against the wood on either side of her and let out an aching sigh as she pushed the static out of her body and into the crate.
The relief was instantaneous, and Sally laughed.
“Better?” Saga asked.
“I wish I knew what set it off. Sometimes it’s from doing actual magick, and I could get used to expecting that.” She thought back to her discharge into Coffee Horde’s outdoor planter, and the personal angst and anger immediately preceding. “Sometimes it happens when I get upset, too. But right now, I don’t know.”
Sally knocked her heels against the side of the crate and enjoyed the thick, vibrating thump of each strike.
“Chaos,” Saga said with a smile. “Expect the unexpected.”
Loki felt in his pocket for the list of immortals he’d tried contacting through the postal service. He wanted Hel’s assistance in confirming who among them had passed through her chamber of judgment or had journeyed to their own underworlds, but something in her tone gave him the impression that such a request would be downright foolhardy.
“I am waiting, father,” Hel said with a manufactured lilt. She flexed her bony fingers as her amber-eyed gaze roamed the hall, now teeming with her minions.
She affected an air of indifference, but Loki knew his daughter well enough to see through the charade. The members of her court squirmed and writhed on the floor before her throne. They laughed when Hel laughed, scowled when she scowled. For centuries, her interactions had been limited to the constrained ritual of dispensing newly departed souls to their final destinations. Loki wondered how long it had been since she’d sustained an intelligent, equal conversation with any being.
She could wait a few moments longer. Loki knew he was being unkind. It was a calculated response to her chilly welcome, and he needed time to take stock of his situation.
The veil of willow branches around the throne was a new touch. The quivering forms of her followers massed together into not-quite-living mounds on the dirt floor and then came apart again in smaller clumps of twos and threes. Some of Hel’s underlings were outright unsightly, with globs of putrid flesh hanging from brittle bones and dark liquid seeping out of orifices and tears. But many, Loki was surprised to see, were healthier looking hum
an forms. Attractive, even. Some of Hel’s more beauteous minions might have passed for models or movie stars back in Midgard, with some makeup and more current clothing than their collage of medieval peasant garments.
A few, though, were trapped in bodies somewhere in between Hollywood starlet and rancid corpse. Their bodies hitched and stuttered as they moved. The near-skeletons were graceful by comparison. The bodies of these in-betweeners shifted, broke down, and reconstituted before Loki’s eyes, over and over again. The display was simultaneously fascinating and sickening, and he was glad he had only tea in his stomach.
“You try my patience, father.” Hel’s gaze came to rest on him as her minions squirmed and oozed and contorted themselves on the ground. “Or do you prefer I call you something else? Are we fully estranged now? It has been so very long.”
Loki cleared his throat. “Yes. My apologies, my daughter. It has been too long. Years—”
“Centuries!” Her shriek was echoed by the inhuman wails of the twisting and clumping bodies scattered about her hall. “I have waited more than a millennium for you, father.”
She lifted her chin and settled into an aloof smile. “Naturally, I began to wonder if something unseemly had befallen you. Perhaps something similar to your earlier imprisonment.”
Loki didn’t allow himself to react. He remembered the sting of each drop of venom that fell from the serpent’s fangs to sear his flesh. How he’d languished in chains in that torturous cave without even Odin and his rage for company. But that had been before Loki and Odin forged their uneasy truce that later grew into an assumed alliance and even kinship, though Odin’s sons had never understood or accepted it. Strong bonds could be built with the few who’d lived as long as Odin had, though Loki had already been ancient by the time the All-Father came on the scene.
“No,” Loki said. “Nothing so inconvenient as that.”
The corners of Hel’s black lips twitched upward, and Loki knew he was making some headway. But he’d have to do more than melt her heart if she were truly set against him. He lowered himself down on one knee and kept a wary eye on her wriggling followers.
“I did make entreaties on your behalf,” he said.
Hel examined her ragged fingernails as though she were admiring a new shade of nail polish—Ghoul Gray, perhaps. “It was not enough.”
“No,” Loki conceded. “It was not enough.”
Nothing he had done, or promised, or threatened had been enough to vacate his daughter’s banishment to Helheim after the Norns screamed in their strangled voices about the certain doom that would befall Odin and his kin at the hands of Loki’s offspring. And so Fenrir had been bound in one prison after another, coming finally to that wolf sanctuary in Washington State before Managarm set him free. And Hel, who had been so gloriously clever and full of cheerful mischief, was exiled from the living worlds and condemned to rule over this realm of the dead.
“And I suppose you could not bear to witness your child wither and rot in such a place as this, even if she sat on the throne.”
“Helheim was never something I wanted for you.” Loki had to choose his words carefully. Hel wasn’t as tricky as Badbh and her Vanir faeries, but any oath sworn in Helheim was inviolable.
“Yet you stood by and allowed my ignominious coronation.”
Loki bowed his head. “There is little point in cataloging what actions and strategies I undertook on your behalf. I offer no apology for your present situation, as it was not I who placed you here.”
The statement was true enough. It was Odin who had cast her out, and Frigga who chose Helheim for her exile. Loki heard the hiss of Hel’s laughter and looked up.
“I offer my regrets for not coming sooner to visit.” He gestured around the hall to its slithering denizens and walls of living-dead trees. “But you seem to have made the place your own.”
Hel hissed again, the laughter whistling between her shark-like teeth. She lifted a thin hand and waved away his words like dust in the air. “There is no apology you could offer to mend an injustice that was not of your making. You are here now. Am I correct in suspecting this is not a familial visit?”
“Technically it is.” Loki decided to abandon their game of definitions, or they’d be at this inane back-and-forth for days and nights on end and he didn’t have a handle on how the passing of time in Helheim tracked to Midgard.
“Have you by chance entertained Odin or his lady Frigga in this Hall?” he asked.
At the mention of the All-Father and his lady, the twisting forms on the floor turned sharply toward Loki. They spat wordless protests and displayed their gruesome smiles. Even the beauties among them had corpse teeth. Moving almost as one, the supple mass of rotting bodies slid across the dirt to huddle around Hel’s throne. They attached their bodies to her moss-covered pedestal like a single wheezing forest tick. Loki got the impression Odin and Frigga were not popular figures in Helheim.
“You speak their names.” Hel’s calm stood in sharp contrast to the painful thrashing of her minions. “The names of my sworn enemies.”
Loki frowned. He couldn’t remember Hel swearing any oath against Odin or his kin, though she certainly had cause. Maybe she’d vowed her revenge as she struggled to assert her place in this realm of shadows. It didn’t matter. The words pained Loki’s heart. He hadn’t set out to heal the deep wound to his daughter’s pride or to reconcile her to the remaining members of the Lodge—such a mission was nigh on impossible. He didn’t like to see his progeny in such pain, regardless of their prolonged estrangement, but perhaps her foul disposition was something he could work with.
“You have not answered my question,” he said flatly.
Hel’s dark lips twisted into a sneering smile. “Of what importance is this information to you?”
Loki raised himself to his feet and warned himself to hold steady. “There has been no word of them from the Valkyries, though they should have passed this way some time ago. My concern is that they have been, shall we say waylaid at some point along their journey.”
Hel’s smile broadened and she tapped one skeletal finger on her armrest, the hard tick of bone against wood dictating the rhythm of Loki’s living heart. He swallowed and pretended not to be unnerved by her control over his body. He had no idea she’d gained such power. In a moment of cold clarity, he realized she was toying with him, rather than the other way around. He needed to get out, fast.
“And so you come to me.” An expression of smug control settled over her, and she sat up taller in her chair. “You need me.”
Loki hesitated. He wouldn’t have framed the situation in those terms, but he needed to know what she knew or what she might have heard. Admitting as much would shift the balance of this conversation against him, permanently. He didn’t have much of a choice, but he could maintain a certain detachment.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said.
She chuckled and the mass of followers clumped against her pedestal slithered and coughed their echoing laughter. Loki studied his daughter on her throne of twisted vines. How long had she been confined to this hall of shades and shadows? How long had it taken her to accept these obsequious corpses and playthings as her only companions?
Though she hid it well, the madness was evident in her face. Loki couldn’t fault her for it. Insanity was possibly the only defense against an eternity in this hall.
“We will make a bargain,” Hel said with a dip of her chin. “One I trust you will find most agreeable.”
“I am listening.”
Hel glanced down at her minions and lifted her hands with an air of annoyance.
“Begone!” Her voice cut through the muffled hall and nearly pierced Loki’s eardrums. With mournful cries, the heap of flesh separated from her throne to scurry and slink away into the forested darkness.
Hel grinned down at her father, standing in the empty hall as her only supplicant. “Now we can speak more freely.”
Loki smiled because it seemed to be what sh
e wanted from him. “You spoke of a bargain?”
She took in a deep, luxuriating breath. Loki’s breathing had been deliberately shallow since his arrival, as he tried to avoid the thick scents of mold and mildew.
“Suppose I have the All-Father and the Lady of the Hearth in my keeping.” She admired her fingernails again and avoided eye contact with Loki.
Loki didn’t leap to any conclusions. Her language was deliberately vague, and that gave him pause. Perhaps she had to be mindful of her own words in Helheim.
“Do you have them or not?” he asked.
“Suppose I do.” She turned her gaze upward. Loki couldn’t spot what had caught her attention in the tangled darkness lurking over her throne. “What would you give me in return?”
“In return for Odin and Frigga?”
Again, Hel hissed and recoiled at the sound of their names. Loki lifted a hand in apology.
“What would you do for them?” she demanded.
A cold shock radiated from the center of his body, but it wasn’t Hel’s doing. His own strength was draining from him. The weakness that had been hounding him for centuries was catching up to him. There was so little of him left, and he wondered if Hel could sense it.
She sat on her throne, waiting for him to seal his own fate. There was little chance he would leave this hall without swearing over something precious and vital. He just wished he knew what she was after. What might she covet more, to increase her own power or to punish him? Perhaps equal measures of both.
And what could he offer that would be worth the exchange of Frigga and Odin? His daughter knew nothing of the uneasiness within the Lodge or of his own dwindling influence. He thought of his tiny house and its sparse furnishings, and what little use Hel would have for any of it.
Loki spread his hands in a gesture he hoped conveyed confident acquiescence rather than the powerlessness he felt. He met her gaze and tried to suppress the smile he felt coming on.
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