The Trickster Edda Read online

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  It really wasn’t hesitation at all, this business of walking very slowly back to Conrad’s apartment. There just wasn’t any point in rushing after everything else. So he needed to pick up some clothes that weren’t flowered yoga pants or an outfit the Fates apparently had some kind of problem with, even though there was nothing wrong with plaid, and he’d only worn it the once, and even then just because he hadn’t done the laundry in a while—and anyway how about cutting a guy a giant slice of break cake, seeing as how he had a shitstorm of crazy currently raining on his many parades, okay? Jeez.

  No. A clothes run just wasn’t that important. So they strolled. Nothing wrong with strolling. It wasn’t like either of them were thinking of the giant, hungry birds that might still be there, or worse, the landlady wanting to know just what the hell did you bring into my building and how exactly do you propose to pay for it?

  Nothing like that at all. Nope. He was a chosen one, bubbling with muscles and charisma, swaggering anywhere he wanted to swagger with a beautiful woman on his arm. The fact that this beautiful woman could fry someone alive was purely coincidental.

  They were a team. And since Lily was pretty much the coolest human being to ever exist, they made a really kick-ass team, and a kick-ass team like them would not be pretending to look at the wilted and possibly plague-ridden flowers outside his decrepit apartment building on the grounds no one notices how beautiful things are until things like this happen.

  Things like this being, of course, a Norse semi-god with a very powerful Fate for a potentially irritable ex-girlfriend, an entire pantheon of really peeved Norse actual-gods, a rabid dog the size of a small elephant, two giant raven-headed man-things with a fondness for eyeballs, specifically theirs, and of course, wet laundry.

  It was one of those weeks.

  Faced with the inside of the building, there was suddenly much, much less fodder for not-hesitation. The wrought iron staircase looked like it’d started life as a fire escape before getting pilfered from another building, for one thing. And even those poor souls brave enough to risk the landlady’s wrath by tagging the sagging plaster restrained themselves to tiny, pen-written notes in the shadowy corners where no one who wasn’t really determined would see them.

  Together, they climbed the death stairs, and Conrad didn’t use the few, sad scribbles on the wall as an excuse to hesitate at all.

  Hope is a symptom, the first floor told them.

  The second settled for, penispenispenis, with an illustration in case they were unfamiliar with the concept.

  At Conrad’s floor, the last read, The End is Ni, hopefully written by a fan of Monty Python and not someone who got eaten before they could finish.

  Going by recent events, both were equally likely. But, oh look, the shattered splinter that remained of his front door lay cockeyed on his welcome mat and, aw man…

  Conrad crossed the hall to peer into his apartment and, okay, guess what, if Loki ever ended up giving him magical powers or something, those jerk pigeons were going down.

  The place was in shambles. Most of door remained intact, albeit halfway across the room and wedged into the wall. But they’d torn down his clothes from the strings and trampled them into the filthier than usual carpet—and wait, was that…?

  They’d actually shat on his clothes.

  Those fucking pigeons had shat on his clothes.

  Lily took a deep breath as she was able with one hand covering her nose.

  “Stay in the hallway,” she said, patting a comforting sort of hand on his arm. “I’ll go find what’s wearable. We’ll deal with the rest of this after we stop the world from ending.”

  Despite the state of his every worldly possession, Conrad cracked a smile. “You are like the James Bond of crisis control right now.”

  Lily beamed behind her hand.

  “When I was eight, a dragon burnt down our garage to settle a bet with my great-great grandfather,” she said, as if of course.

  And then, because apparently his face had done something strange without his consent again, she laughed and said, “Don’t worry. We’re not in dragon country here. And mostly, the big ones live in the in-between places.”

  Ah. The in-between places. Nothing to worry about. They only lived in the in-between places he and Lily had just walked through to get to her apartment, totally ignoring the slithering, always just out of sight thing that had followed them the entire way.

  Lily smiled at him and stepped inside the apartment, gingerly picking her way between piles of things better not thought about. Conrad remained outside, stuck back on square one.

  “Tell me,” he asked. “Can dragons go invisible?”

  “Some of them,” Lily called from inside. “Why?”

  “No reason.” Conrad leaned against the wall and felt his legs slowly dissolve. “I’m just going to wait out here.”