The Trickster Edda Read online

  * * *

  After waiting an uncomfortable half hour in a line, during which Conrad mostly tried not to stare at the locals and dread the creeping apocalypse, they finally slipped inside the front doors. Well, Conrad slipped, at any rate, sort of easing his way past the doorman who obviously had some kind of troll squatting in the not to recent past of his family tree. Loki sauntered in, hand in hand with Lily and her sunshine draped over both of them so any magically inclined watchers wouldn’t spot his giant swirling abyss of an aura right off.

  They were pretending to be lovers—newlyweds, even—both of them ungodly chipper, arm in arm, and every now and then one would lean into the other and usually Lily would end up laughing. Conrad didn’t want to know why, and he certainly did not want to explore the riotous conflict going on in his stomach region. He just wasn’t going to think of it.

  Maybe it was jealousy. Probably, it was jealousy. Or something really similar. Lily was gorgeous, after all, especially right this second, and it didn’t help that she was kind of flirting with Loki.

  He was jealous. Absolutely. Because he didn’t find the god of chaos kind of hot right now, not at all, not even considering the incredibly attractive body he’d shifted into, no. No. No, no, and no. That way lay madness, and he did not have an invitation.

  Considering the already tenuous grip he had on his mental health just now, it was probably better to stare at the locals. Some of these people looked like cosplayers. Except, you know, cosplayers who were beyond serious, and even then there was something off about them. Most of them looked harried. Like, finally off work after a long day of slaying something big and deadly type of harried. Kind of weathered. Weathered was a good word for it. Especially as the stains on what cloaks he could spot through the crowd were kind of… questionable.

  Of course, some normal-ish people meandered through the dimly lit smokescreen of the Cauldron. But normal-ish wasn’t saying much. They looked his age, sure, but even unmagical Conrad could tell they were much, much older than any human had a right to be, and it creeped him the hell out.

  A woman brushed past, trailed her fingers down his arm and managed to turn him around with a feather light touch. Conrad followed without thinking, caught in the heartbreak of her face. Unspeakably, painfully beautiful, smoke coiled from her lips natural as breathing, no cigarette required. When she smiled at him, a smoke ring twined out like a living hand, caressing the skin of his cheek while something strange burned in her eyes, jarring behind the beauty.

  Conrad knew enough from Lily’s en route briefing on glamour magic to know Not Good when he ran smack into it. But Loki had been just as insistent on show fear and you’ll be eaten alive, and Conrad still wasn’t sure that had been a metaphor, so he just stood where he was, watching her, watching him. At last the woman snorted.

  “Chaotic, eh?” She sounded kind of like she enjoyed gargling broken glass and, wait, hold on a second, hadn’t she been gorgeous? “Too stringy for me. But watch out for the sirens, darling. They’ll be dying to gobble you up.”

  And then she drifted off, more smoke than woman—and an actually quite ugly woman at that, leaving Conrad bewildered and quite a bit behind the others. They hadn’t gotten far. Lily’s sunshine was just bright enough to follow her by, but this afterhours ComiCon of horrors dirtied it, somehow. She looked… ordinary here. And seeing as how people on the street did not randomly try to outshine the sun, this place was weird as hell.

  Sidling through a throng of people, Conrad crossed the floor to stand by Lily. She and Loki scanned the crowd as it mulled around them, shock still in the middle of the seethe.

  “Are we looking for Fates?” Conrad ventured after a long moment, looking around at the pretty much standard bunch of weird shit connoisseurs.

  “We’re looking for Hod,” Lily whispered, just loud enough to be heard. “The Fates are manning the bar. Don’t look directly at them. They might feel you.”

  And, okay, somehow that wasn’t as weird as the strange needle-toothed hideously beautiful woman who’d just tried to bedazzle and eat him. Conrad could actually do this. He was the king of strange things.

  Sort of sliding his gaze over toward the bar, Conrad discovered abruptly that no, he really wasn’t the king of strange things. Even just a glance had him spinning, his head a sea of ice.

  All three Fates lined the bar. Two wore dresses from the twenties. As in, directly from the twenties, brand new, no duty paid and let’s skip that nasty business of the ninety years between. They should have been gorgeous—like a Michelangelo fresh from the block, new and shining. But Conrad looked at them and felt only terror, like a rabbit in the shadow of circling owls. Even the one without makeup scared him, and she only sat sulking at the end of the bar in an overlarge hoodie with something suspiciously ice-cream-shaped in her lap.

  Bizarrely, her ice cream broke Conrad’s quiet haze of fear. He realized they were all doing pretty normal things, actually. The one ate ice cream and glared, another typed into her laptop and glared, and the last tended bar and glared. One big, furious family.

  Very delicately, Conrad looked away.

  “So Hod,” he said. “How will we know when we see him?”

  “Probably won’t,” Loki said, winking at something Tinker Bell shaped in a tutu and mohawk. “Not unless he wants to be seen, at any rate. Rule of thumb, though, if anyone looks this way and gets too intent, run.”

  Conrad rolled his eyes. “You know, it’s really great you’re so popular.”

  How in the hell were they supposed to pick out gods who could look like anything in a crowd of this many milling oddities? Half of them were giving Loki the eye, a third of that half giving him a very intent eye, if sexual combustibility counted for intent—and actually, Loki didn’t make that bad of a girl. Somehow, the torn coat and neon shirt looked like a fashion statement with boobs underneath. Better than the blood-soaked disheveled accident he had been, anyway, and speaking of boobs, Conrad’s shirt looked pretty good on…

  Loki caught him staring and winked. “What? Wanna hold my hand, too?”

  Pulling a face, Conrad busied himself with finding the Waldo of the magical world and not blushing.

  Chaos gods were so weird.

  “How’s your stomach?” Lily murmured. Something in the way she said it made Conrad pay attention.

  “Holding together, sweetheart.”

  “Good. Look.”

  Without his quite noticing, Lily cast some kind of a spell. He didn’t see it, but he could feel it tugging at his jaw in a decidedly Lily-like way, pulling his head toward the far corner of the room. Out of the way of the overenthusiastic crowd of mages and Fate fans, an ordinary looking man sat reading his book.

  Considering the bar’s other occupants, this man was downright bizarre. With all the shimmering wings and magical mists, here this guy sat, so milquetoast that wallpaper looked interesting in comparison. Brown hair, glasses, tweed. Kind of like Conrad’s history professor, actually, and wait—

  No.

  Not just kind of—that was Conrad’s history professor.

  And in his sudden, blinding panic, Conrad totally missed the gigantic man-eating wolf lying under the table.

  “Are you okay?” Lily asked, pressing a gentle hand to his arm.

  “That’s Dr. Hothe.”

  “What?”

  “He teaches history. I know him.” The shock of it tumbled out all at once and Conrad knew he was babbling in a distant sort of way, but he couldn’t even hear himself think. “He likes my papers and we talk about stuff, and he’s a totally cool guy, but if someone tells me he is not human I swear to all the gods currently in this building—and I bet there is a ton the way my life has been going—that the universe will implode on itself through sheer improbability.”

  “Oh, stop sniveling,” Mimir sighed. “It’s hardly that bad. Do you realize how many old, outmoded gods there are lying about? Odds would stand that you’d know at least one.”

  Loki snigger
ed. “So that’s what Hod’s been doing. College girls.”

  “He’s wearing glasses. Is that the trick?” Lily arched an eyebrow. “The trick you learn when you get to be old and powerful? Glasses?”

  “Did I say it was impressive? I distinctly do not remember saying it was impressive. And they are enchanted, thanks very much.”

  “Is that a wolf?” Conrad most definitely did not squeak.

  “Mm. Hey, kids? What do you think the odds are that Fenris’ll want to kill me today?”

  “That’s your son?” Lily asked, suddenly as pale as Conrad—and that was especially un-good because she was the one with the firepower, and anyway a dragon burnt down her garage.

  Compared to that, a big dog with many pointed teeth was nothing.

  “Yeah. What? Doesn’t he have my dashing good looks?”

  Lily turned to look at him—her?—Loki. “If that’s Fenriswolf, where’s Jormungand?”

  Oh. Right. The giant serpent meant to swallow the world. Yeah. That was a totally legitimate worry. But Loki smiled in a way that was actually comforting and squeezed her hand.

  “He’s a pacifist and happily courting a series of migrating whales in the Atlantic Ocean. You will never see him.” And then, as if he wasn’t announcing his intention to pester an ancient force of the universe, “Let’s go see Hod.”

  Loki and Lily strode through the crowd like a happy couple, their locked hands swinging, Conrad trailing miserably behind. And Loki was good at being a woman because there was no way in hell in a million years that, had this previous week not happened, Conrad would have ever, ever guessed that this actually really kind of attractive woman could turn into a hairy, seven-foot-tall giant covered in magic tattoos.

  Professor Hothe looked up from his novel as they approached, eyeing them over horn-rimmed glasses, just like he would have done had anyone come barging into his office. He wasn’t a god. He couldn’t be. He was just… just so human.

  “Hello, Conrad,” he greeted pleasantly. And then, watching Loki and Lily, which, hey, didn’t the whole glowing thing strike him as weird? “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

  Under the table, the wolf lifted his head. “About time, too. Been here hours, and all the food is cooked,” he said, and his mouth moved real stiff, like the creepiest damn animatronic ever, and kind of sounding like a New Jersey cop with a pack a day habit.

  Loki grinned and sat down, reaching under the table to scratch his chin.

  “I’ll take you out for dodo when this is finished.”

  “You’d better,” the creature grumbled. “You owe me big.”

  Oh god.

  No, wait, cancel that order. No more gods. No more gods ever, at all.

  Conrad took the seat between Lily and Hothe in a way that absolutely was not his knees buckling out from under him. Of course, Lily might have suspected that was the case because she reached under the table to hold his hand and that was sweet of her. Would have been sweeter if she wasn’t holding Loki’s hand on top of the table to keep his aura from giving them all away to the mercy of the Fates, but hey, he’d take what he could get at this point.

  “Great to see you again, Hod,” Loki purred. “You know I missed you.”

  Was he… he’s flirting. Loki was flirting with his history professor, shaped like a woman who, given any other set of circumstances, he would have happily drooled over—and oh yeah his history professor was also a god. Conrad started to think he should be getting used to this sort of thing by now, but no. No, still thoroughly disturbing.

  Hothe shot Loki the bland you are disrupting my class, isn’t that strange look he was known for on campus and, carefully marking his page, eased the book shut.

  “Your shirt seems familiar. Stealing clothing again, Loki? I thought we broke you of that habit.”

  “Really? I’m hardly even housebroken. You know you can’t teach me manners.”

  “So it seems,” he said and leaned back, one hand casually covering the title of the book.

  Except Conrad knew that book. He’d been in and out his office for years, and that book—that particular book—was the only one that never saw a shelf, always lying somewhere around the room, and how many times had he picked it up and flipped through it, waiting for some meeting or another to end? He could recognize those battered, dog-eared pages in his sleep.

  Conrad felt cold, way down in his hollow chocolate center.

  Hothe had the Edda.

  “You’ve walked into something of a trap, you know,” he continued blithely. “I’m supposed to keep you in the building long enough for June to have her intervention.”

  Loki snorted. “Her what now?”

  How many of these people wandering the crowds were gods, Conrad wondered? How many came from somewhere else, where their cloaks and decidedly un-cardboard swords were the norm? Where this sort of magic was mundane as science and computers?

  And Professor Hothe was Hod.

  Wow. Okay. He helped murder his own brother, which really put a damper on the whole family advice thing he’d given Conrad once, but at least it explained why he’d been totally awkward while doing it.

  “They think June ‘just needs to learn how to quit you,’ I believe it was,” he said, his distain marking the air quotes, and, no, wait, back up—his history professor murdered his brother once upon a time, but now he wore tweed and gave Conrad actually pretty sound advice—and why was he reading the Edda anyway? Was it like some kind of family photo album for him? Did he like to read about his brother over and over again? Or was he looking for a prophecy, some kind of trick or spell or something normal people couldn’t see in the words that were there, because otherwise the world would go to seed around them—and ohthankgod a waitress.

  The waitress approached the table like a death trap, the look on her face a cross between I do not get paid enough and I will miss my arms when they are ripped from my body. Way to make Conrad feel all nice and cozy, sitting between two gods, a witch, and a wolf, because he’d really been trying to start thinking of this as a normal night out but, oh look, yet another glowing person. There went that plan.

  While Conrad dealt with his shell shock, the others ordered. Loki managed to do so with a minimum of leering and general creepiness, which was something of an improvement. Squeezing his hand, Lily ordered something that sounded like it had apple juice in it with a smile and a pointed look—hey, wow, she was trying to make him feel better, the saint.

  All he wanted was a nice, normal beer for the nice, normal occasion it would be if he had to reimagine the whole event, which he relayed to the nice, normal waitress who still looked as though she were waiting to combust at any moment.

  And generally speaking, the nice, normal waitress would nod and go away to return later with sustenance, only now she fixed him with the eye like the life choices that led her to waitressing were all his fault and said, “Can I see some ID?”

  For a minute, Conrad thought she wanted to see the invitation card. But no, she hadn’t asked for the others’ and he was obviously not the one leading this little parade of madness. She was really, totally carding him.

  Of course.

  Making a face, Conrad extracted his hand from Lily’s to dig for his wallet. He couldn’t blame the waitress, really. They were both the same level of normal, dodging people who looked like they didn’t leave the house without a spell scroll or eight, getting drink orders from a couple of glowing women, an otherwise very normal man babysitting a wolf, and a college kid.

  If he were her, he’d card the college kid too.

  “So do they have any idea where Mimir is?” Loki asked when the woman had left, shifting a little to better ogle her retreat.

  Hothe gave him a look that usually involved late papers. “You have him.”

  Loki flashed a smile on the whole other side of comforting.

  “Yes, of course I do,” he said, leaning forward. “Where are the others?”

  “Loki.” And yup, there it was. The yo
u really do not expect me to give you actual credit for this drivel, do you look.

  Loki stared back at him. His stare was not nearly as complex. Mostly, his stare said yes, shut up. Conrad watched the stare come pretty close to working and, holy crap, if he could learn that look, majoring in history would be a hell of a lot easier. But at last, Hothe’s stare won out because the man wasn’t human—except, crap, he literally wasn’t and, oh god, Conrad felt nauseous, watching Loki duck his stare and turn to find a waitress to watch instead.

  “I know exactly where he is at, thanks very much,” he announced, grinning at the waitress as she returned with their drinks.

  “Oh?” Hothe asked, doing the eyebrow thing he was so good at. “Well, the others are petitioning the Collective Consciousness of Elsewhere and the King of the Underground to agree to stop protecting you for the express purpose of retrieving Mimir.”

  “How’s that going, then?”

  “A surprising, spectacular failure. Apparently you do have friends,” he said, and the slightest edge of a smile twitched at his thin lips. “We were all quite shocked.”

  As fascinating as their banter was, Conrad found his attention drawn back to the bar like a snare trap at the flurry of voices hissing vaguely unfriendly things like him and disembowel. Conrad found himself transfixed in a way that meant scared shitless as three terrifying pairs of eyes fixed on their table, while three equally terrifying sets of admittedly very nice legs removed their owners from assorted barstools.

  “Oh fudge,” Lily whispered, and Conrad sort of wondered if she was squeezing Loki’s hand as hard as she was holding his. “That plan you sort of implied having, Loki? I really hope you weren’t lying.”

  Loki chuckled in a way that was not nearly comforting. “I wasn’t lying, exactly…”

  Hothe sighed. “And so it begins,” he murmured, doing something with his hand, and suddenly Conrad felt his skin tingle.

  “What did you…” Conrad started, but faced with three Fates, two gods, a witch, and a wolf, he decided he was probably better off not knowing.

  “Protection spell,” Hothe answered. “I thought you’d appreciate the extra buffer.”

  Seeing the Fates now halfway across the bar, Conrad nodded. It didn’t feel like Lily’s sunlight—more like a solid steel plate between him and the oncoming wreckage of his life—and he didn’t really think either one would help him if the Fates were determined to shred his soul to bits or something, but he felt better knowing that at least two people cared that he didn’t end up food for the Powers That Be.

  “Thanks,” he croaked, and he was grateful, sure, but those women were booking it across the room, the two flappers dragging behind them the sullen third, and almost to the table now.

  Hothe smiled, giving his shoulder a squeeze and, hey, did helping Loki mean he got As forever, because he kind of doubted it, but it’d be super nice.

  Under the table, Lily squeezed his hand and sunlight went shooting up his arm. Which, hey, Hothe and a really pretty girl he just met who nevertheless put up spectacularly with the shit seemingly attracted to him like some kind of shit magnet were both together on the whole Conrad’s a pretty cool dude, how about we keep him alive thing, which was great. He was in the middle of a bubble of love and fuck off, Fates and, hey, alright. Bring on the women that ruled the universe.

  Except, you know, so long as they were angry at Loki.

  The two Fates from the twenties stopped in front of the table, glowering at Loki with their hands planted on their sparkling hips. And yeah, there was no hiding that these… things were Big Trouble with capital letters and possibly a hyphen or eight. They looked human, sure, but in the way airbrushed, photoshopped models looked human: big black eyes, rogue, and pouting lips. Only now those porcelain mask people were 3D—Destruction, Dismemberment, and Death—and horribly real in a way those magazine covers were never meant to be.

  Know what? Screw dignity. Conrad shrank back as far into the plush leather seats as he could go. Lily was glowing bright enough to beat a star, and there was something like fire hissing over the professor’s visible skin, but Conrad only had what he was sharing. Sure, they were shielding him, and seeing how one was a god, the wards might even take them into the second round of celestial ass-kicking, but these creatures? Yeah, once upon a time, these creatures had made the gods.

  “Hello, May. April,” Loki greeted. He turned, smiling at the last Fate, bringing up the rear in a cloud of sullenness, and said with actual fondness, “Hey, June.”

  For a second, June looked like she might spit at him. Ethereal as the others, she seemed the safer bet, even glaring daggers, with her arms locked over the front of her Macbeth University hoodie. Exactly which eye had Loki been talking about, Conrad wondered? Because there were six black eyes fixed and glaring at the lot of them, not a one missing, and Conrad really, really hoped that didn’t mean they were all going to die.

  Lily squeezed his hand again. Or maybe Conrad squeezed hers. It wasn’t really possible to separate whose death grip was causing the bones in their hands to creak.

  “Your clever little charms won’t work on her anymore,” April announced, smiling nastily, with a voice like church bells breaking.

  May picked up where she’d left off, a separate body but the same thoroughly terrifying voice, “We’ve warded her. Your manipulation is unacceptable.”

  “She won’t stand for it anymore,” April continued, and they were bookending sullen June, celestial linebackers in antique satin. “She is beautiful and intelligent. Any man here would eat his own intestines to bask a second in her glow.”

  Sullen June was not glowing. Sullen June was, in fact, doing the very opposite of glowing and seemed to be sucking all the light from the room, her lips pursed so tightly they could cut diamonds.

  Conrad caught the expression on Loki’s face and, for a terrifying moment, thought he was going to mention just that. But before he could start, the sisters surged, rearranging themselves somehow without really moving, and now June was in the forefront.

  “Tell him you are complete in yourself, June,” May hummed.

  In a flash, Loki was on his feet, still a woman, but towering over them, teeth bared, and Conrad wouldn’t have put money down on either of them in a bet, he’d have gotten the hell out of that arena before the whole place went up in flames, but, oh look, here he still was.

  “Of course she is,” he snapped, looming over the flappers and, wait, what? “You saying she’s damaged?”

  Conrad glanced at Hothe, hoping that he would know what the hell was going on, but he only shrugged, as irritated as Conrad had ever seen. But they weren’t dead, which was a big plus. And apparently the flappers didn’t know what to make of Loki either.

  June was smiling now, insofar as you could call a twitch at the edge of her scowl a smile, while her sisters looked past her at each other and rearranged themselves in front again.

  “You are unworthy of her,” April insisted, flustered.

  “She is more powerful than you can hope to be,” May followed, fast enough to step on her sister’s line.

  “Hell yeah, she is,” Loki said, like he was defending June, when June and her sisters were standing there with who knew how many plans in the works to kill him and, holy shit, it was working. “And you need to back the hell off of her.”

  Disgruntled, April and May glared at each other. “We?”

  “You parade her around like some vapid, empty-headed little sweetheart without the gray matter to make up her own damn mind, and you have the balls to tell me she’s perfect?”

  And holy shit. He was getting all angry boyfriend on them. He’d just turned the situation around one hundred freaked-out percent and the flappers didn’t know what to do about it. The looks they shot each other made it obvious this was not at all what they’d signed up for. But June’s scowl was somewhat closer to a smile, and suddenly Conrad felt their messy, impending deaths had just been averted.

  “You do not appreciat
e her,” May decided at last. “Your charm is a spider’s web. Weak, but dangerous.”

  “You wanna talk about appreciation?” Loki glared, leaning forward, and no, he really didn’t understand personal space at all. “I’ll—”

  “Oh, by the Tree, shut up.”

  Startled, the flapper sisters and Loki stopped just short of launching into a magical catfight and turned to look at June. But while Loki looked shocked and almost distressed, Conrad had known him just long enough to tell, even as a woman, he was oozing smug.

  Beside him, Lily caught his eye and mouthed, “We’re doomed.”

  Apparently, she’d seen it too.

  Loki grinned, seeping with as much charm as he possibly could to cover the smug leakage.

  Oh yeah. They were doomed.

  “The goddess speaks,” he purred.

  June fixed him with a stare. “I will deck you.”

  “Understood.” Loki nodded and shut up, but the grin really didn’t help the odds of their survival any.

  “June—” May started.

  June glared at her sister, digging in her hoodie pocket for a pack of cigarettes.

  “No, you shut up, too. I told you this was a stupid idea, and hey, guess what? It’s a stupid idea.”

  April shook her head with an insistent you are my sister and I love you, but you are also an idiot look.

  “He is manipulating you for his own purposes… and a Jotun.” She added the last in a way that made it sound like sheep molester.

  “Yeah, he’s a shit. I’m not exactly surprised. He was a shit the day Odin brought him home, and he’s a bigger shit now.”

  Loki grinned. “It’s why you love me.”

  June fixed him with a look so far from loving it could probably set something on fire.

  “You are a pus-oozing leper not fit to lick my vomit. We are so not a couple, Loki, and I still intend on killing you as soon as I find my eye,” she snapped. And then, softening, “Which is why I’m going to tell you this.”

  Identical looks of sullen alarm flashed across her sisters’ faces. One of them started to speak. June turned and a three-way staring contest started. Conrad kind of wondered if they were having a telepathic argument. He just as strongly did not want to know.

  “You’re a doll, June-bug,” Loki offered, charm on full wattage.

  Her sisters cringed. June glowered.

  “Thor and Freyr will be here in less than a half hour to collect you,” she said, turning her full, probably very unhealthy attention back on Loki. “Hod was supposed to steal your humans and take them back to Odin, but apparently he hasn’t, so you’re ahead of the game. If I were you, I’d throw yourself on their mercy. Because I can promise you, what I’m planning on doing to you will be much, much worse.”

  She smiled. Conrad wanted to hide under the table, wolf or no. Hell, given the choice, he’d hide under the wolf.

  “But in the meantime, give me a call and we can fuck.”

  Loki winked at her, slipping back into his man-shape and, great, there went his shirt’s elasticity. “Will do.”

  June just shook her head, turning to go, the look on her face a complicated mix of loathing and fondness. “Keep the tits,” she said, and then, over her shoulder. “And bring handcuffs.”

  Laughing, Loki settled back down into his seat and watched the Fates return to the bar, arguing amongst themselves. “I think that went pretty well.”

  Hothe watched him, one eyebrow perfectly raised, and gestured to the lump of ohthankgodstillalive he and Lily had melted into in a way Conrad assumed meant in front of the children again, you pervert? Which he was almost grateful for, but knowing gods, it could mean something else entirely and, oh yeah, speaking of which, the whole history-professor-sent-to-kidnap-him thing. There was still that.

  “So are you a bigger fan of our continued survival or your father?” Conrad ventured. “Because, no offense or anything, but I’m really tired of running from people who want to kill me because of this asshole.”

  The professor pulled a sour face, reaching under the table to scratch Fenris’s ears. “I’ve never really agreed with my father. Humans are… fascinating creatures, capable of great things. I don’t approve of his scorched-earth tactics.” He smiled slightly, meeting Conrad’s eyes. “Also, someone needs to look after you while Loki’s busy aggravating those who want to kill him.”

  And, aw, hey, way to be a pretty decent guy. A guardian god who was also his college advisor? He could do worse. Dissertation was going to be a bitch, because after all this, it wasn’t likely Hothe was going to buy any of his usual excuses for slacking, but hey, at least he’d survive to see his dissertation.

  “What would you say my chances of er… needing looking after are, exactly?”

  He smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. “My father will want to crack open your head like a clam and wrench Mimir out by force.”

  Already shaking hand halfway to her drink, Lily froze. “I thought he was supposed to be subtle? A politician type.”

  “No one keeps their temper long where Loki is concerned.”

  For his part, Loki grinned, looking like an imp who’d managed to steal a halo but couldn’t quite figure out which way it went. “You always manage.”

  Hothe looked at him.

  “Are we waiting for a god or two to show up?” Fenris grumbled from under the table. “I haven’t eaten god in a while.”

  And then Conrad felt a big, big furry head settle on his knee.

  “Hey, kid. Scratch my ear or I’ll bite you.”

  Lily giggled. Conrad wondered if the stress was finally getting to her. “Come here. I’ll scratch you.”

  The wolf chuckled. “You can scratch me any day, baby.”

  Hothe looked vaguely disgusted. Conrad imagined he looked pretty much the same way. For his part, Loki only looked amused.

  “Whore,” he said, downing whatever noxious concoction he’d ordered in one go.

  “Oh yes,” Hothe drawled, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Do make comments about your son’s sexual perversions.”

  Grinning, Loki shrugged, the stitch scars gleaming on his lips again. Before he could say anything too disturbing that would stick in Conrad’s head for the next three million years, he ventured, “So the gods coming this way to pry my head open? I’d like to avoid that, if at all possible.”

  “Works for me,” Loki said and then, calling across the bar, “Hey, June-bug? Do you think you could separate them for me?”

  She gave him the finger. Loki smiled and blew her a kiss.

  “She’s crazy about me,” he said, turning back.

  Hothe chuckled. “She’s crazy about a nice spike with your head on it.”

  “That too. She’ll still do it, though. Wants to kill me herself too badly to let some amateur get me,” he said and stood. “She won’t be able to distract Thor with tactics and politics. Which means we’ve got about ten minutes to get to the other side of town.”

  Lily looked at Conrad. Conrad looked back. What, did she think he understood the way Loki’s mind worked or something? He was just along for the ride because he’d been hijacked by a god parasite.

  “What’s on the other side of town?” she asked, taking tip money out of her tiny purse.

  Loki grinned. “Monster trucks.”

  Conrad felt like throwing up.