[Anthology] The Paranormal 13- now With a Bonus 14th Novel!

by Dima Zales

  Loki’s legs crumple beneath him, and there is some laughter from the villagers that sounds far off and uncertain. Before he hits the ground, Odin catches him. Hoisting Loki up in his arms, Odin cradles him like he would a babe, or a woman. Loki scowls. And then he realizes if Odin did throw him over his shoulder like a proper warrior, he would probably throw up.

  “Come on, Loki,” Odin says, not unkindly. “We’re going home.”

  Loki smiles and waves at Jonah, and the villagers, and the girls. He is embarrassed. A little. Or maybe a lot. He is too drunk to properly gauge the emotion.

  And Odin coming to spoil his schemes is so normal … he suddenly knows at last he is safe.

  When the bus drops them off at the intersection of Canal and Lake Street, Loki’s head immediately turns to the south east and downtown. Chicago is hot, sticky and tall. Very, very, tall. Across a dreary parking lot and the river, skyscrapers tower. It’s all he can do to keep from gaping. Every single building seems to be as tall or taller than the Empire State Building. And nearly all of them seem made of glass. Some of the windows are darkened, but others are bright mirrors that reflect the large white clouds in the Midwest sky — they seem to Loki to be gigantic moving canvases. And to think they’re all solid, and real, not dependent on illusions like the buildings of Asgard.

  “Yes,” says Amy. “Lovely parking lot. You can see the pollution on the horizon. But it’s Chicago. What can you do?”

  Loki blinks. There is a bit of haze low to the ground, but … “It’s cleaner than I remember,” he says. And it is certainly cleaner than Victorian England. For a place that doesn’t have a Void to dump the garbage from their misspent magic, Chicago is doing rather well.

  “Huh,” says Amy. “Let’s catch a taxi.”

  She holds out a hand, and a white vehicle that is very similarly shaped to the chariot of her would-be-abductor screeches to a stop.

  As Amy and the driver wrestle her bag and a rather large trunk into the back, Loki slips into the interior. It is blessedly cool inside. He stops and peeks between the seats to the front. The dashboard is alight with glowing numbers. One is clearly the time, another is the temperature, but all the others are completely incomprehensible. He blinks. Computers are everywhere.

  The buildings, the computers — Earth is turning into a place that is almost magical. It temporarily makes him forget about the hunger that is beginning to gnaw at his stomach and the exhaustion tugging at his limbs. Odin’s spell to stop time drained him more than he thought possible — how Loki resisted it is a mystery.

  He shakes his head. He won’t solve that puzzle now. Leaning forward, he tries to get a better view of the numbers on the dashboard.

  The driver and Amy slip into the car and put on their seat belts. “814 N. Hermitage,” Amy says and the cab driver steps on the gas so fast Loki falls backwards in his seat. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Amy staring at him with a look of pure confusion on her face. Even Fenrir is cocking her head in his direction. For a moment he thinks that his illusion of totally retro clothes has fallen again, but he checks, and it’s still there.

  As they speed away from the center of the city along Chicago Avenue, the buildings get noticeably lower. Many are also noticeably older — two and three story row houses of stone and brick that are visibly sinking into Chicago’s soft soil. These familiar buildings are interspersed with newer abodes with tremendous windows that can’t be sensible for temperature regulation or for warding off potential intruders. It really is a good thing that Asgard put a stop to the Jotunn plans for a new ice age on Earth — and took care of the troll situation.

  As they drive further west along Chicago Avenue, shops and restaurants begin to appear. Many of the names are in Spanish, and Loki notices a great many people who seem to be of South American descent walking among the natives of European and African origin.

  They turn up a green, leafy street. About a third of the houses seem to be very new, a third are old and decrepit, and a third look old but lovingly maintained.

  Amy says, “This is good,” and the cab stops so fast that Loki braces his hands on the front seat.

  The cabbie, who had been so solicitous when Amy got into the cab, doesn’t do much more than throw Amy’s bags on the street after she pays him. As he speeds away, Loki watches as she tilts the trunk up and tries to drag it while simultaneously trying to heave a large cylindrical cloth sack.

  It occurs to him that he’s probably supposed to help. He is from Asgard. Centuries ago, Asgardians would occasionally take humans as servants. It never works the other way around … But plenty of Asgardians have mocked Loki for his lack of pride before.

  “May I help you?” he asks solicitously.

  Shaking her head, she says, “No … that’s okay … I can manage it.” Dragging the trunk along the ground, she bumps into the curb and nearly topples over. The trunk and the bag fall to the street.

  He tilts his head. She seems to know her Norse mythology, so he says, “Don’t be such a Valkyrie.” The winged warrior women are always so touchy.

  “What?” she says. Apparently his gentle jibe didn’t translate well. Rather than explain, he just bends down and grabs the trunk by both ends.

  “Don’t … ” she starts to say, coming forward.

  He swings it over one shoulder with ease.

  “It’s heavy,” Amy says, touching his free arm before he can move away.

  She stops and looks down. He looks where her hand is. She feels his armor, even if she can’t see it. Her gaze meets his and her brows come together.

  He’s saved from having to say anything by the sound of a woman’s voice. “Amy! Amy!”

  They both turn to see an old woman coming down a narrow walk from an old brick two-story house of the lovingly maintained variety. Ivy climbs nimbly up the walls and spills out over the yard.

  Loki tilts his head. He isn’t used to the elderly. Their wrinkled papery skin and white hair remind him pleasantly of gnomes, but the old have a brittleness to them that gnomes don’t share. Aging seems such a terrible affliction.

  The old woman is wearing a dress that wouldn’t be out of place last time Loki was here, but she wears the same leather-like shoes with stripes and laces that Amy wears.

  She wraps her arms around the girl and Fenrir begins yipping up a happy storm.

  “I’m so glad you’re home! Don’t ever travel alone again! Take a plane, take a train, take a bus!” the old woman says.

  “Oh, grandma, it was a freak incident … ”

  Pulling back, the woman says, “Don’t go quoting me statistics about lightning strikes and how unlikely this is ever to happen to you again. It happened once! That’s enough.”

  “Grandma … ” says Amy.

  But the old woman is coming towards Loki, arms outstretched. “You’re the man who saved my darling granddaughter!”

  Loki’s eyes widen. She’ll embrace him. Loki’s not squeamish about physical contact with humans, unlike some Asgardians … Asgardians like Heimdall, that stuck up stickler for protocol and station, but she’ll feel Loki’s armor. Picking up Amy’s remaining bag, he says, “Careful, I don’t want to drop these on you.”

  She stops and closes her hands together. She beams at Loki. His head roars with the sound of She’s all I have left in the world, thank you, thank you, thank you.

  Loki blinks. More human prayers in his head? But the saving of lives is done. This is so very odd.

  Despite the torrent in Loki’s mind, all the old woman says is, “Oh, yes, of course.” But she continues to smile at him, and something in his gut constricts. He’s always thought of prayers as a weak trick, but he’s beginning to think they’re deceptively powerful. He’s not sure he likes it.

  “Thor, this is my grandmother, Beatrice,” Amy says.

  Shaking her head, Beatrice says, “Such an unusual name. My late husband would have loved it.” And then turning she says, “I hope they lock up that horrible Malson man and put him away forev
er.”

  Loki looks at Amy. Apparently she hasn’t been entirely truthful with Beatrice. Catching his gaze, Amy winces and holds a finger to her lips. Loki raises an eyebrow. There was a time on Earth when even grandmothers would have reveled gleefully in stories of heroics, no matter how gory.

  Up ahead Beatrice says, “Come inside out of the heat!” and waves them both up the narrow walkway. “I can have food on the table in thirty minutes. Everything’s ready; I just have to heat it up.”

  Mouth watering at the word food, Loki follows them in. Looking very uncomfortable, Amy says to him, “Um, if my bags are too heavy you can put them down … ”

  He’s tired. He’s hungry. But they’re not heavy. “Where do you want them?” he asks.

  Amy jumps a little at the sound of his voice. Being hungry always makes him cranky; it’s beginning to show, evidently.

  “This way,” says Amy. He follows her up a narrow staircase to a small sleeping room.

  Setting them down on the ground, he says, “Whatever your grandmother is cooking smells deli— ”

  A tiny ping rings through the room.

  He stills at the sound.

  Ping.

  There it is again, and the most infinitesimal of pressures on his back. Scowling, he spins around. Amy has her fingers outstretched, a guilty look on her face. It takes him a moment but he puts it together — she pinged his armor with her finger.

  “What do you want?” he says, the words coming out harsher than he intends.

  Backing up a little, Amy looks down. “To know I’m not dreaming.”

  Loki sighs and rubs his eyes.

  Ping. Ping.

  He feels a light pressure now on his lower arm.

  He opens his eyes and Amy has her fingers outstretched again. This time she doesn’t look guilty. Just confused.

  “You shouldn’t go ping,” she says. “I have to be dreaming.”

  He stares at her a moment, beyond irritated. He’s saved her life, sat through a tortuously long questioning session, carried her bags for her — and he’s hungry. Yet she has the gall to question her good fortune, to question him, and to ping his armor.

  He suddenly has the desire to be a little cruel. “You’re not dreaming,” he says. Dropping the illusion he stands before her in his armor. “Does this help?” he says with a smile.

  “No!”

  The sound of footsteps on the stairs makes the girl turn her head. “Change back,” she says. “Don’t frighten my grandmother.”

  Loki would rather not frighten anyone who will feed him. He slips back into the illusion of “totally retro” clothing.

  Beatrice comes around the corner, a stack of linens in her hand. Loki smiles benevolently at her.

  “Amy, why don’t you show him the spare room?” Beatrice says.

  Taking the load from from her grandmother, Amy says, “This way.”

  As she leads him out of the house, Loki looks up at the sky. He sees no sign of ravens, the spies of Odin. He doubts Heimdall can see him. Heimdall has to know where to look first. Just in case he puts on his helmet, disguised as a fedora, before he follows her across the tiny lawn and into an alley behind the garage. Amy unlocks and lifts the garage door. Inside, off to one side, is a large vehicle. It reminds him vaguely of a Jeep.

  Amy leads him past the vehicle to a door. She unlocks it and says, “It’s a little inconvenient,” and then leads him up a flight of stairs. Every step upward the heat becomes more and more oppressive.

  Loki lets the illusion of Earth clothing drop again. It’s a game, and she started it.

  At the top of the stairs she turns around and jumps at the sight of his armor. She does have one of the lovelier bosoms Loki has seen on this or any other world, and the bounce does rather nice things. He smirks.

  Thrusting the pile of linens at him, she says, “Here.” And turning around again she walks into a medium-sized room. There is a bed in one corner, and a couch. “The shower is that way,” she gestures towards a door, “And the swinging door takes you to a kitchenette. I think there are glasses. There isn’t any food, though. Do you need me to show you how to turn on the air conditioning?”

  That’s it? No more questions?

  … Air conditioning?

  He is a Frost Giant, and the room is rather uncomfortable, even if his armor does have some temperature control.

  “I would like help with the air conditioning,” he says.

  She walks over to a boxlike thing in the window, plugs it into the wall, and shows him how to operate the dials. And she hands him some keys, and walks towards the door. Just before leaving she turns. “See you in about 20 minutes.”

  He tilts his head and looks down at his armor. He blinks. “You’re not bothered?”

  Her eyes go wide, and she looks down. “I’m probably going crazy and dying at the bottom of a ditch somewhere, but you know, this is an interesting dream, a better dream than that reality, and you’re responsible, so I’m grateful and I’m just going to go with it until I wake up … ” She swallows. “Or not wake up … or whatever.”

  Well, now he actually feels like a heel. And a little foolish. Really, she’s quite lovely and just his type. Although he’s currently not in the mood, he certainly has no issue with indulging in passing carnal pleasures with a human. No use burning bridges.

  Going forward, he takes her hand. “Miss Lewis,” he says in his calmest, most reassuring, most courtly tone — he is in armor, no use disguising his origins anymore. “You are not dying. You are home, you are safe, and the gentleman from the forest is no more. I do regret that my lapse in control has caused you to doubt this. If I believed it were prudent, I would offer to erase your memories and allow you to forget seeing Fenrir as a wolf, the portfolio pictures bursting into flames,and my armor. But memory erasing is a tricky business, and … ”

  He looks down at her hand. It is shaking. Pursing his lips, he says, “This is not reassuring you.”

  “Not at all,” she confirms.

  “Damn.” With a sigh he makes to kiss her hand. It is a courtly gesture, one he would bestow on a lady in Asgard had he distressed her accidentally.

  To his shock, she rips her hand away before it even touches his lips. “That really doesn’t help,” she says.

  Eyes wide, Loki holds up his hands. “No offense meant.”

  Scowling and looking away, she says, “See you in a few minutes.” And then she turns and disappears down the stairs.

  Tilting his head, Loki turns in the direction of the shower, thankful that he knows what one is.

  He’s just rinsing his hair when he sees the red mist again. It wraps around him in the shower, and the hair on the back of his neck stands on end. The child’s voice comes again in Russian. “The petty bourgeois are keeping the grander house to themselves and leaving you the meaner accommodation.”

  Blinking the water from his eyes, Loki restrains a shudder. “I’m grateful I don’t have to rob banks again for food and a place to stay,” Loki says. Stepping through the red mist and out of the shower, he grabs a towel.

  “My Josef robbed banks, too,” says the child voice. “For the revolution.” In a voice that sounds slightly ashamed, it adds, “And food … and soft ones.”

  “Josef?” says Loki. Obviously, the mist wants to talk to him, and Loki isn’t so foolish as not to comply.

  “He woke me. He touched me. But he wasn’t like you. He couldn’t hear me.”

  Slipping on his breeches, Loki says, “You have a corporeal form?”

  “Yes,” says the mist, its voice sounding fainter, the red magic ceding to pink.

  “Where are you?” Loki asks.

  “It is impossible to know position or momentum with certainty,” says the voice, barely audible now, the mist almost invisible.

  Leave it to a magical creature to stumble over the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Magic really was just expanded quantum theory.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Loki says, trying to remain patient.
“But you can think of your position in relative terms to mine and then give an estimate of location … ”

  There is no response. Loki exhales heavily in frustration. He is very curious. But he doesn’t have time for this right now. He needs to eat and sleep to give himself enough energy to open a gate to the World Tree. He needs to find Valli and Nari.

  He slips on a shirt that was in the pile of towels and sheets. Stepping out of the bathroom, he looks at his armor and sword laid out neatly on the bed.

  Beatrice is going to touch him. He just knows it. He goes to his knapsack, pulls out his book and slips it into his pocket. Closing his eyes, he briefly projects his consciousness out of the small room, through the roof, and into the sky. There are no ravens in sight.

  Jaw tight, he heads for the stairs.

  5

  Thor, the weird maybe figment of Amy’s imagination, shows up for dinner wearing a chambray shirt that used to belong to Amy’s grandfather. Her grandfather was a tall man, but it still barely comes to Thor’s waistband. He’s rolled up the sleeves so they don’t look too short.

  He’s shaved and his hair is clean and combed back from his eyes. It’s disturbing, but he of the inappropriate King-Arthur-esque come-ons cleans up nicely.

  She shakes her head. Remember the armor, Amy. Remember the ping when you flicked his back.

  Remember he saved you …

  She sighs. She is probably just imagining all of this. It’s too much to think about, so she focuses on the spread on the table.

  Beatrice has pulled out the stops for Amy’s rescuer. Amy’s grandmother is of Ukrainian descent, and the table shows it. Stuffed cabbages, sausages, boiled potatoes, and homemade sauerkraut. Amy prefers to eat vegetarian, and in deference to that her grandmother has also laid out some cheese sandwiches and mushroom soup with dumplings.

  Thor sits down with a big smile and proceeds to eat everything. He doesn’t eat fast, doesn’t shovel food in his face, but he’s like a machine. He just keeps going, and going, and going.

  Her grandmother asks him questions, and he answers quickly and vaguely and turns the conversation back to Beatrice. He asks all the right questions about the neighborhood, and Beatrice is happy to expound on how it had once been predominantly Ukrainian but now is filled with yuppies and Mexican “foreigners” — Beatrice doesn’t quite catch the irony in her being from the Ukraine and a foreigner. Thor doesn’t comment.