Ragnarok: I Bring the Fire Part VI (Loki Vowed Asgard Would Burn)

by C. Gockel

  “What a useless talent,” says Rush.

  “I wish it was mine,” Bohdi says. “I think it’s awesome.”

  Steve’s hand pauses. He feels a spark in his mind. The incarnation of Chaos thinks Redman’s talent is “awesome.” He remembers Ratatoskr’s words, The team with Chaos always wins.

  Behind the tarp, Steve hears Larson say, “There has to be some way to turn this talent off.”

  “No! Lieutenant, wait,” Steve shouts, spinning around. Stepping through the curtain, he finds all eyes on him and hope growing in his chest. “We don’t turn off anyone’s talents,” Steve says. “We find out what they are and how to use their magic.”

  x x x x

  Bohdi’s magic is useless. Amy is lying in his arms. Her eyes are closed. There is a neat, round bullet wound on the side of her neck and blood is seeping through her shirt. He has a moment of panic … How did this happen? He glances down at his hands; where they aren’t in medieval-meets-video-game chic armor, they are blue.

  He’s dreaming again, and he wants to wake up, but that would mean leaving Amy, and he can’t to do that, even in a dream. He hears a voice whisper in his mind, You destroy everything beautiful. It’s a strange voice, but Loki recognizes it—it’s Baldur’s voice. The vision of Amy blurs and he is looking at another woman with skin so white it might be porcelain, features so symmetrical they make him ache, and long black hair. Her blue eyes are wide and cloudy with death. He knows her name—Anganboða, it means joy bringer. And then his vision blurs again, and he’s looking at golden-skinned Sigyn; and then it’s Amy again. He begins to shudder, and then his thoughts—or Loki’s thoughts—flood his mind, and he is Loki.

  Amy is not Anganboða, or the fearless Sigyn; she is fragile, human, and weak in body and mind. But she’s been in his bed, and he enjoyed her company more than he should have—she’s clever enough, for a human. She said she loved him … foolish creature … as though she could know what love is. She is a child.

  Loki hears footsteps. Closing his eyes, he sends his consciousness through the building. They’re sending a team in to kill him. He could steal into the In Between, leave this place, emerge in another … but … he looks down at Amy. She’s too weak. The passage might kill her.

  She’s probably as good as dead, anyway; he should leave. He hears the men in the hallway and almost leaves, but then he remembers hearing her in his mind. Maybe that isn’t love, but it is a connection. She is important in some vital way to him. Or she was important until they killed her. He starts to laugh, and his voice sounds mad even to his own ears. Closing his eyes, he imagines the space he occupies appearing empty. He hears a man slip into his apartment and makes that man appear as himself. The man is promptly shot by one of his own. Loki continues to laugh. In his arms, Amy’s eyes open abruptly. “Bohdi?” She turns her head, and whispers, “I don’t know if I should wake him.”

  Everything goes dark. It takes Bohdi a moment to realize his eyes are open. He’s awake and still in the thumb of the giant’s glove. He hears wind, and then a dim bluish light flickers on. He finds himself staring up at Amy, holding her phone up for light. Without thinking he reaches up and touches her neck. Her pulse beats against his fingers, her skin is completely unmarred.

  Gently taking his hand, she says, “So I guess I probably don’t need to ask if you were having a bad dream?”

  Bohdi pulls away, feeling vaguely dirty. He didn’t like being in Loki’s head. He’d always thought that Loki was in love with Amy and that’s why he gave her the memory dump; she’d always insisted otherwise. But Loki didn’t love her, he just … needed her? Took comfort in her? He finds his nostrils flaring, and his skin heating.

  “Bohdi?” says Amy.

  “I’m fine.” It comes off gruffer than he means it to. She shifts slightly. Before she can pull away, he grabs her hand and stares down at her fingers. They’re very small, soft, and very fragile compared to his own—but Amy outsmarted Odin in this universe and another and out-maneuvered the U.S. military-industrial complex. Yet Loki thought she was weak—it makes him furious.

  He pulls Amy’s hand to his chest, unable to meet her eyes, but not wanting to let her go, and wanting to apologize, even if he isn’t Loki.

  “We’re all having weird dreams.” Park’s voice is a whisper, but it hits Bohdi like a thunderclap—he hadn’t realized they were being observed. His eyes slide to Park squatting down beside them, outfitted in all his gear, rifle slung over his back. “But yours was the freakiest. You were laughing maniacally.”

  Bohdi’s eyes dart to Amy; she’s staring down at their fingers. She’s not pulling away. He’s not letting go.

  Park rattles on. “I thought maybe some evil Asgardian had somehow managed to teleport in here or something. Can they do that?”

  “Loki and maybe Odin could travel through the In Between,” Amy says, and Bohdi’s muscles tense in recognition of the word. Amy looks up at the ceiling. “But not into a room lined with Promethean wire.”

  “That’s not comforting,” says Park. “That means anywhere out there they could …”

  “Park, your shift’s not over. Get your butt back out there,” Warrant Officer Berry grumbles in the dark.

  “Yes, Mister Berry,” says Park, standing up, the weak LED flashlight he carries bobbing as he rises.

  “Is it still snowing?” asks Amy quickly.

  “So bad, it’s hard to tell if it’s day or night,” Park says.

  Bohdi hears Amy release a long breath. As long as it’s snowing, they’re relatively safe. Even if Heimdall finds them in their hideout, Odin would have to create a World Gate, and any of the Asgardians or Gerðr would be able to sense that. The team would be able to make a mad dash to the mountains on their snowmobiles before the troops were even here. The balloons and drones they let loose when they first arrived are still in the sky. With their tech to guide them through the whiteout, they might just escape, or they might die. But Odin’s men would be lost in the blizzard.

  Once the snow stops, however, there is a World Gate about two miles away that the Allfather might use—the same one Loki and Thor used when they spent the night in this very spot.

  Bohdi’s fingers slip between Amy’s. She has given him meaning—to trick Odin into paying attention to the team on Jotunheim while magic spreads to humans on Earth. To do that he has to stay alive. His mind spins in the darkness. The dream … Loki had used illusions to trick the SWAT team into killing one another.

  “Too bad none of us are strong enough to create illusions,” Bohdi says. Sigyn had explained last night that magical invisibility was much simpler than illusions. For invisibility, one could piggyback off the naturally-occurring phenomena of quantum entanglement. Entanglement allows photons to be in two places at once—both behind the object they want to hide and in front. But creating illusions requires the splitting of beams of light into different wavelengths of color and the blocking of some light to create shadows. It requires a lot of imagination and a lot of power. None of the magic users can create illusions—and they can’t even perform invisibility to the same extent Loki could.

  “We’ll think of something,” Amy says. Her fingers slide and entwine with his, and he doesn’t feel the cold anymore. He pulls their joined hands to his lips without thinking, but then from somewhere in the camp comes the tinny sound of a phone playing Reveille.

  Guys groan and a light flicks on. Bohdi doesn’t release Amy’s hand. Since they’ve discovered they’ll be stuck here, the men’s glances at the women on the team have been a little less professional, a lot more longing. They can’t have her.

  A shadow suddenly looms over them both. Bohdi blinks up to see Beatrice scowling down at him. She jabs Bohdi with her umbrella. “Ouch!” says Bohdi, releasing Amy’s hand and rolling backward, sleeping bag and all.

  “Grandma!” Amy exclaims.

  Beatrice’s eyes remain trained on Bohdi. “What are you doing lying there? Where is Fenrir? She was here the night before!”
>
  Amy bolts upright. “Where is Fenrir?”

  Brill, one of the guys who had been on the first shift of guard duty last night mumbles, “Probably out digging in the snow. Dog is awesome. Dug us out when the whole entrance was snowed in.”

  “Go back to sleep, Brill,” Berry says. “You haven’t had your eight hours.”

  Brill rolls over in his bag and within seconds is snoring.

  Bohdi pulls himself into a sitting position and starts rifling through his bag for his clothes. A few bodies over, Claire sits up. “Oh, I want to see the snow!” She scampers out of her bag, only wearing the long underwear she had borrowed from Mills that are several sizes too big for her.

  “Put your clothes on, Claire!” says Beatrice. But Claire’s already dashing beneath the tarp. From beyond the curtain, Steve’s voice thunders, “Claire!”

  Bohdi finds himself grinning as he pulls on his pants and hears chuckles from the other guys. He looks over to Amy and finds her face stricken as she quickly pulls on her clothes. Before he can ask what’s wrong, Steve’s voice comes from beyond the tarp. “What the hell?”

  x x x x

  The snowmobiles wait in neat lines in the palm of the glove. Outside the storm rages on, making the interior of the glove dim as dusk. Claire stands next to Amy’s mutt, her features hard to distinguish in the gloom. But Steve can see her eyes, wide and frightened.

  “What is it?” Claire says, voice shaky.

  Steve’s got his Glock out and aimed at the thing on the top of her head. It looks like the evil child of a rat and a spider, and Steve’s never liked either.

  “That,” says Valli, on guard duty, “is a spidermouse. Extremely venomous.”

  Cold dread washes through Steve. His hands shake. The thing on Claire’s head cheeps. He hears Park’s safety clicking, and then hears the tarp swing up behind him, and Dr. Lewis’s voice. “Don’t shoot!”

  Steve doesn’t shoot, but he doesn’t put his weapon down, either. Keeping a beady eye on Steve, the thing rubs its nose with a wicked-looking long forearm.

  Running past Steve, Lewis scoops the thing off of Claire’s head. The thing gives a cheep, runs on its long legs up her arm, and then slides into the collar of her shirt.

  Patting the little lump above her breast, Lewis says, “He’s really very friendly.” The creature turns around and pokes its nose out and squeaks.

  “Lucky mouse,” someone says.

  “Oh, he’s cute,” says Claire. “Can I touch him?”

  “No!” says Steve.

  “He’s friendly, Steve.” It’s Bohdi’s voice, right by his ear. “Could you put that thing away?”

  It’s at that moment that Steve realizes his Glock is aimed squarely at Lewis. Breathing heavy, he puts it back in his holster. He’s vaguely aware of the other guys coming through the tarp.

  “Where did you get it?” Steve manages to grind out.

  “Loki gave it to me,” Lewis says. “The night we went out with all my friends.”

  One of the guys says, “You were on a first name basis with Loki?”

  Steve can feel his brain cataloging that not all of the team is aware of Lewis’s history. “He knew more than her name,” Valli says. And Steve notices a sneer on Nari’s lips … which is odd. Before, on Earth, there were a few moments when he thought Loki’s son was a bit taken with her. These observations are secondary, though. Steve feels something in his brain click, and a sort of buzz of electricity in the back of his skull. “Lewis,” he says quietly, “where did Loki get the mouse-thing?”

  She blinks.

  “Spidermice come only from Hoenir’s hut,” Nari says. “Odin thought they were too dangerous to be allowed anywhere else. It must have hitched a ride on our father last time he visited Hoenir.”

  The buzz in Steve’s mind travels all the way down his spine. To Lewis, he says, “Did Loki get it in Washington, D.C.?”

  Her eyes widen. “Yes! How did you know that?”

  His eyes go to the creature. Its whiskers are trembling. “You sent me an email about them appearing in D.C.” That was just a little while before Loki got hold of Cera … and apparently they could have only come from Hoenir’s hut. Which meant Hoenir had to be in D.C., too.

  “Oh, that’s right … I didn’t have Squeakers then. Loki gave it to me after our fight. He knew I’d like him.”

  In as calm a voice as he can manage, Steve says, “You didn’t tell me.”

  Lewis puts a hand over the creature. “Because you would have done experiments on him!”

  “It’s venomous.” The words come out a hiss, even though Steve doesn’t mean them to.

  “I didn’t know, and he saved me from the other Loki!” Lewis says.

  “Other Loki?” says Sigyn.

  Bohdi steps over to Amy. “Squeakers saved us from Odin,” Bohdi says.

  Steve’s eyes slide to the kid. Bohdi smiles, cheery and dangerous. “Don’t mess with Squeakers, Steve.”

  For a moment, Steve’s vision goes completely white in fury. Bohdi had kept that thing a secret after all Steve has done for him?

  “Is he really friendly?” someone whispers. Maybe it is Cruz.

  “Yes,” says Amy, too brightly. Her face dims a little, and she says. “Unless you try to attack me, then he bites.”

  “That’s what makes him great,” says Bohdi, giving a smirk that is so like Loki, Steve almost shivers.

  A gust of wind whips into the glove, and Steve does shiver. But the cold brings his mind into focus. The bigger enemy is out there and Steve needs Bohdi. Turning around, he counts down from ten. He sees but doesn’t see Larson staring at him. He feels the buzz down his spine again. “I know who Prometheus is.” But he’s not sure how he knows.

  “A Titan?” asks someone.

  Larson’s eyebrows jog up. “The government source?”

  Steve nods. Prometheus was the source who supplied humans with Promethean wire and said Loki was “the Good Guy.” Loki said the Promethean wire was Vanir…

  “Sigyn,” Steve says quietly. “Did Hoenir really spend time in Vanaheim, as part of a prisoner exchange?”

  He hears her step beside him. “Yes, but it was before my time.”

  “In the myths,” Steve says, “he created humans …”

  “He was, I think, an advocate for humankind,” Sigyn whispers. “But Mimir always said evolution created the races of the Nine Realms.”

  All the pieces click into place. Spidermice were only found in Hoenir’s hut and, apparently, in Washington D.C. The senators who visited Steve in the hospital and asked him to come on this trip called themselves the Prometheans. He never asked if they had met Prometheus, but if they had, D.C. is probably where it would have happened. Prometheus said he couldn’t get to Amy and Bohdi in Nornheim because his doors were closed, and Sigyn had said Hoenir used doors in his house to walk between realms. Hoenir is Prometheus. Steve is almost sure of it.

  “Steve?” says Sigyn.

  Steve turns around. His eyes go to Lewis. Bohdi’s got a hand on her shoulder. The kid’s giving Nari and Valli a look like he might kill them. Lewis has the spidermouse in her palm and is showing it to Cruz.

  Creation and Chaos are always together, and together they are stronger than Order. His eyes drop to the hard-packed snow beneath his feet. In the myths, Prometheus gave humans fire. In real life, Hoenir had given humans protection from magic. His eyes lift. Lewis with Bohdi gave humans magic …

  Hoenir can’t kill or even maim, according to the Asgardians. What had Harding and Mills said about Lewis? She throws punches like she is swatting a fly?

  He takes a step toward Lewis and Bohdi. Could Hoenir have handed off the mantle of Creation to Lewis? Is Lewis the Creator? Is that why Odin wants her so badly? She has that curious gap in her memory after Loki’s confrontation with the World Seed ...

  For a moment, Steve can’t breathe. And then all the carefully constructed pieces of the puzzle break apart in his mind. If Odin knew that Lewis was Creation he wo
uld have come himself and snatched her up personally. She’s interesting to the Allfather, but not that interesting.

  He rubs his temples. Since the confrontation with Cera, Prometheus has contacted him several times … which is very interesting, but it kills his theory. If Prometheus is Hoenir, and Hoenir has been confirmed alive since Loki’s death, then Lewis can’t be the Creator. “Damn it,” he mutters. “I hate magic.”

  “Sir?” says Larson.

  “Nothing,” Steve mutters. Then raising his voice, he says, “Lewis, put that magical … critter … away.” His eyes flick around the room. Most of the men came out not fully dressed when they heard him shout. They’re starting to shiver. Shaking his head, Steve says, “Get dressed people, get breakfast, and then get to your posts.”

  Everyone in the room not suited up begins to file toward the tarp. Lewis slips the rodent into her shirt. Just before she and Bohdi slip by, Steve murmurs, “What are you, Doctor Lewis?”

  Bohdi and Lewis draw up short. The looks on their faces make Steve take a step back. Their eyes are wide and mouths agape. “What?” Steve says, suddenly feeling as though the ground beneath his feet has shifted.

  “That’s almost exactly what Odin asked me,” Amy says.

  Steve’s shoulders fall, and it’s not an act. He feels slightly sick to his stomach. Odin has twice tried to abduct Lewis. He swallows. “Forgive me,” he says. “You’re human, of course …” He tries to smile, but can’t quite manage it. He meets Lewis’s eyes. “ … An interesting human who saved my daughter’s life and rescued me from paralysis.” He holds out his hand. “Peace.”

  Lewis stares at his hand for a moment and then takes it. Her hand is ice cold and terribly small, which doesn’t make Steve feel any better about what just transpired.

  Releasing her hand, he inclines his head toward the curtain. “Now go suit up before you freeze to death.”