* * *
Conrad came to in an alley off Sixth, smelling hot dogs and melted cheese. Loki stood above him, red hair sticking upright, frayed coat buttoned and filthy, smirking like he’d been when they met and, wait, wait a goddamned minute, it was not a dream. It could not have been a dream. He’d been terrified, he’d been hurt, he’d been—
“Oh, stop it, you sadist,” Lily said, but she was smiling as she punched Loki in the arm and knelt down to help Conrad off the incredibly filthy concrete. “He was trying to make you think you’d hallucinated everything. I take it his evil plan worked?”
Loki sniggered, steadying Conrad as he finally swayed upright. “It was hardly evil.”
“Not evil, no,” Conrad agreed, finding his feet. “Still makes you a giant jackass.”
“It was a pretty wretched thing to try,” Hothe said.
“Mischievous,” Loki insisted. “It was mischievous of me. That’s what I told the monks at the time, too, but they had the whole evil thing stuck in their head and off we went. Blamed all sorts of things on me.
Hothe snorted. “All sorts of mostly true things.”
“Not the matter at hand, Hod, and whose bloody side are you on anyway?”
“Conrad’s, I’d imagine.”
“I’d like some fries,” Fenris grumbled, padding toward the mouth of an alley. “Does this guy sell ‘em?”
“I would like something a little less revealing,” Mimir muttered, stalking out of the darkest corner. “A wet hospital gown covers more than this.”
Beside him, Lily giggled. Somehow, they’d ended up holding hands again, both of them sort of sparkling. Lily looked like she’d been dipped in fairy dust, while he looked like he’d been walking on shag carpeting in wool socks for ten years, sparks shooting off of him in all directions like one of those Fourth of July things, and just disheveled enough to have conceivably spent the past ten years alone in wool socks.
But the whole near-death thing was over, and the smarmy British guy wasn’t in his head, instead walking mostly naked, wearing an impromptu toga, behind them and rather displeased about the lack of underwear at the very least, so Conrad really couldn’t help himself.
He turned, took Lily’s face in his hands, and kissed her.
Hard.
Her magic settled on his skin, twining with his as his tried to lay claim to her entire face, and ten thousand possibilities and futures and adventure that didn’t end in death went up in a hundred thousand tiny explosions behind his eyes, kind of like a mad scientist fused with a dragon, only ten thousand times more awesome, and possibly with something super addictive thrown in. And suddenly Lily’s hands were at his back, her body pressed against him as close as she could be, and the two of them fitted together like the right puzzle pieces found at two different yard sales. And Conrad felt like he’d licked a light socket in the best possible way.
* * *
So in the end, four lunatics and a talking wolf walked out of an alley next to a hot dog vendor that would never, ever serve anything to Conrad ever again. Which, yeah, pretty much summed up his life.
But Lily laced her fingers through his, looking as deliriously happy as he felt, and definitely headed toward her apartment, and he didn’t care he’d almost died more times than he could count today. He didn’t care that Loki was obviously following them back, him and Fenris both smiling in the exact same creepy way. Conrad did not even care that horrible Mimir would probably also be borrowing clothes from him he would never see again.
Because, this day?
Epic.
Crystal Lynn Hilbert lives in the forgotten backwaters of Western Pennsylvania and subsists mostly on old trade paperbacks and tea. A fan of things magical and mechanical, her stories tend towards a peculiar blend of science and spell work. These stories have appeared in such magazines as Kaleidotrope, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and with Apex Magazine.
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