The Trickster Edda Read online

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  Loki sat at the couch, wet hair sticking up at all angles, clashing magnificently with Conrad’s neon green and mysteriously clean dinosaurs do it from the past T-shirt. For whatever reason, that shirt just tickled the hell out of him and he would not be convinced to wear anything else, having informed them far too cheerfully a moment ago he was keeping it.

  Asshole.

  “Why is he allowed to wear neon green?” Conrad muttered, opening up a second bag of Cheetos.

  “Because she expects it from me.” Loki smiled, smug as… as an entirely too smug thing. “Also, because she can’t erase me from existence.”

  Lily sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Tell us what we’re walking into,” she said. “I heard the Cauldron was neutral ground, but this seems a little weird.”

  Loki shrugged, eyeing the pack of Mountain Dew at Conrad’s hip.

  “Depends on what you mean by neutral ground. If you’re a little witch, meeting a little witch, sure. No one messes with you if you’re boring. But if you’re a big witch, screwing around with gods?” He shrugged again. “The Fates own it and they run it like a soap opera. If you make an interesting character, it stops being neutral ground.”

  Conrad’s admittedly fragile Happy shattered in a rainbow of cheese crumbs. “You mean we’re walking into a trap?”

  Loki laughed. “Are you kidding? Of course we’re walking into a trap. June hates my guts. She hates my kids’ guts. If she could do it herself, she’d have killed me ages ago.”

  “But she can’t?” he insisted.

  One of the Mountain Dews crossed the room on its own to jump up onto the couch next to an incredibly smug chaos god.

  “Not unless she got her eye back. And I’m not naming names, or anything, but a cunning and dashingly handsome friend of yours happened to… borrow it a few years ago and has yet to return it.”

  Conrad felt his irritation with life, the universe, and everything creeping up on him and forced it back down again. On her side of the couch, Lily looked awfully serene. He admired her for it. Life would be so much easier if he could just hunker down in thought and stare off into space with that cute I am thinking very hard face.

  Except Conrad did not have a cute I am thinking very hard face. He only looked sort of like a creeper when he was deep in thought. Though granted, his thoughts tended to be decidedly un-serene, most of them along the lines of: any god who is listening to me—Mimir, you do not count—please give me a flaming sword to stab this jerk with, amen.

  “Okay, well,” Conrad said at last, thinking his very best calm thoughts. “How much time do we have before those birds come back to eat us?”

  “Fourteen days,” Loki answered, and he was being totally serious for once, thank some god who wasn’t Norse. “I killed them. Well, actually, I tricked Garm into eating them. Odin will put them back together, but it’ll take a fortnight or so to get them up and running again.”

  And hey, that was somewhat comforting. At least he hadn’t totally abandoned them when he’d run off. He’d actually been doing something to save them. Sort of taking care of them, in his own warped way.

  Conrad leaned back on the air mattress, eyeing the bandages beneath Loki’s stolen shirt. The guy was a real jerk, graduated top of his class with a major in General Assholery, but he’d gotten that bite mark before the birds had shown up. He’d played chew toy for an incredibly vicious dog, barely escaping with all his organs intact, and had gone right back to take a second shot at disemboweling him.

  For them. To keep Vinnie and Guido from eating their eyeballs.

  Well, in a roundabout sort of way. After all, the birds would probably have gotten to their eyeballs long before Garm got to them. And Loki’s disappearing act sure didn’t help his whole questing hero thing. So Conrad’s psyche could go ahead and knock off the guilt trip already. Loki had only ever been in it to save his own ass. End of story.

  “So what are we looking at, going to the Cauldron tonight?” Lily asked at last, having apparently mulled the matter over while Conrad concerned himself with deciding whether he and Loki were BFFs or not. And yeah, this was why she was the brains of their impromptu operation. “She said not to embarrass her in front of her sisters. Plural. So we know all three will be there. And she made sure to specify we come through the back door. Why?”

  Loki shrugged, scratching at his bandages and ignoring Lily’s resulting glare with skill that had to come from long practice.

  “Back door is for the leading actors in their little soap opera. So the kids playing dress up don’t muddle the entrances. It’s situated in an alleyway between Elsewhere and Underground. Would be the perfect spot for an ambush if they’ve all decided the treaty doesn’t include me.”

  “But you’re so charming,” Conrad muttered, returning to his Cheetos. “Why would they do that?”

  “So alright,” Lily said, nodding. “There’s an ambush. And she’s probably told everyone you’re going to be there.”

  Conrad looked up, a thought occurring to him. “She was really keen on you having your card. Do you have your card?”

  Loki shrugged, crunching the now empty pop bottle. “That’s the thing. I never had a card. They melt around me.”

  “Melt? What are you, toxic?”

  Grinning, Loki stole another Mountain Dew. “Kid, I run on chaos. I’d fuck with Excalibur, let alone enchanted paper.”

  “Are you sure we should go tonight?” Lily asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Into the ambush?” Conrad insisted.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re not expecting that,” he said and grinned, managing somehow to sprawl over most of the couch without appearing to move. “She’s invited a few people, sure. Elder might be there. He’s just a human hopped up on magic apples, though. Pretty much expendable. Hod’s probably who they got, though knowing him he’ll just watch.”

  Lily frowned. “He’s blind.”

  “Doesn’t mean he can’t see.” Loki grinned at the look on her face. “You get old, you learn a few tricks. He’s also usually on my side. The others don’t know that. I’d bet money he’s there, but probably also with a plan of his own, so no telling how useful he’ll be.”

  “So we’ve got a magical human and someone who may or may not be your friend,” Conrad summed up with far too obvious relief. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  Except that suddenly Loki looked far too shifty. “Oh yeah,” he said. “And probably Thor.”

  And lo, almost certain death reared its head again.

  “Never mind,” Conrad muttered and laid down to better nurse his throbbing sense of self-preservation. “That sounds bad.”

  “Wanna know what sounds worse?” Loki asked, like some kind of cheerful death gnome. “Right now, June is tracking down which computer talked to her and sending the rest of everyone who wants me dead down here. So we’ve got to leave in about… oh, fifteen minutes or we’ll meet up with the welcome party.”

  Languishing on the air mattress, Conrad offered up a weak, “I hate you.”

  “Wait,” Lily said and turned to face Loki. “You were Odin’s blood brother. So you were more or less an uncle to all his boys, weren’t you?”

  Conrad sat up with a jolt, trying to send Lily don’t talk about Odin’s kids beams, except Loki didn’t look like he was about to fix her with his battlefield stare. He didn’t look like he was about to do anything, just looked kind of amused.

  Lily chuckled, shaking her head. “Your plan is to go in there, charm Odin’s kids back on your side, and wait for the others who are looking for you to show up, isn’t it?”

  “Got it in one,” Loki said, looking far too smug for comfort.

  “Alright, then what approximately are the odds of us all getting killed?” she asked.

  “Very good, actually.”

  And normally that would have freaked Conrad right out, but there was something in the way he said it—and no,
no there it was, his lips were twitching.

  “Hold on,” Conrad interrupted and, okay, he wasn’t very good at this whole Norse mythology thing, but if he could see the giant plot hole right here, there was something seriously wrong. “Doesn’t your daughter run the underworld? If we died, she could just punt us all back up. No harm, no foul.”

  Loki grinned. “Yes…?”

  “So how exactly do they expect to kill you—you know what, no. Never mind,” Conrad said and stood, brushing the crumbs off his pants. “I do not want to know. Whatever. Let’s do this.”

  An honest, pleased smile that was hardly creepy at all crossed Loki’s face and, wow, okay, he wasn’t nearly so bad when he looked like that.

  “Great,” he said and pushed himself up off the couch. “But give me a second, kids. I need to do my makeup.”

  “What?” Lily asked, and thank god she was asking it because Conrad wanted to know about as much as he did not want to have the conversation he knew was coming.

  “I’m going as a woman.”

  “Why?”

  Loki sniggered, and way to dive head first right back into creepy.

  “For some reason, they never expect that.”