No lie, it was the best spiced, herb-infused pork product shipped from a German monastery full of men of God. Each with but two fingers left to them as they prepared the sausage by the old-fashioned method, using hand-cranked grinders that liked fingers as well as meat. You had to suffer for your God and for your sausage. It went without saying, I was showing their creation the respect it was well worth by waiting a few seconds before I called him the shithead he was . . . and then shot him in the dick. I rarely if ever make idle threats, that it was a mental one didn’t make a difference. He was a dick and giving him a permanent reminder of that dick or lack of it status would be a goddamn public service.
I had kept chewing as I pulled out my Glock and aimed it at his crotch. One more swallow, maybe two and I was good to go. He’d ignored the gun as he’d started his list of favorite deaths to toss at me. There was the Blood Eagle—I had to look that one up later, and, holy shit, nasty way to die, but then he dismissed it as but child’s play. Toddler fights ended up in worse damage. My kind deserved much more advanced punishment. Perhaps bringing my intestines to enraged life, gifting them with teeth and a voracious appetite and sitting back with a fine honeyed wine while observing how long it took for them to eat the remainder of my internal organs would be a fine start. There was no magic in the world, all paien knew that, but he was a god in addition to being a trickster and a liar. Who knew what the bastard could do?
His face hadn’t changed despite the list getting more wildly disturbing. And I knew disturbing like nobody’s business. As unsettling as the list was, that void that hovered within him was worse. For a god of chaos, he was bizarrely still, inside and out. It was the kind of stillness I associated with the long dead and far longer buried. Although now, with the longer and more freakishly weird the death o’ the day menu became, his eyes had begun to change.
They had become more black if possible. Black as the sky at the end of all days when the stars had died and life of any kind and anywhere was long gone. Nothing was left—nothing except waiting for the tsunami to come rolling out of the darkness, one that would unravel the order of death itself. An abyss would not take its place. That was too much. There would be only null. Nonexistence of any kind.
And that tsunami of shadows that would bring it would be named Loki.
He would wipe away the universe as easily as a child’s hand would wipe away the white moisture from a foggy winter window.
But . . . it wasn’t the end of days yet.
How did I know?
Robin would have thrown a much bigger party if it was the end of all ends.
Whether Loki could turn my intestines into his pets hadn’t been number one on my list of things to know when Niko tutored me in mythology as a kid, but from what I saw in his eyes it was number two with a strong lean toward “fuck me, yes, he can.” If I could kill the bastard with a gate, now that was need to know: number one with a bullet.
I finally had swallowed my last sausage bite, tasty in the face of death, and suggested, “Fish fetus?”
I’d kept the gun pointed at his Viking jewels as I did so. I knew it wouldn’t kill a god, this god at least. It might not severely injure him, but I could hope at least that it would hurt. I had used my other hand to offer him a crusty speck of bread covered with caviar that had been forced by another server onto my ridiculously small plate that could handle only one crumb of food at a time—rich people, so annoying. The sausage server hadn’t returned and salty fish eggs were not my thing, which made them a perfect peace offering. I was defining peace as a “distraction while I gate your molecules into a hundred different places at once.”
In any case I didn’t want it and this bloodthirsty, Auphe-prejudiced, somewhat scary as hell nut job was from or ruled over at some point the great white north where the human part of the population ate the testicles of a seal if they were lucky enough to catch one. Fish eggs should be his thing.
It was as close to social as I could fake . . . before I’d given him a grin as cold as the ice that I assumed had birthed him. “Or does that glacier stuck up your conceited ass screw with your bowel habits?”
Then, as I’d internally promised myself, I slapped his true name on him by adding, “Shithead.” I’d also simultaneous pulled the trigger of my Glock and opened one hundred gates inside of Loki, god of Chaos, Mischief, and Speciest Fuckers, to every place I had ever been in my life or had ever seen with my own eyes—including the sun, the moon, Mars, Venus, and Auphe homeland/hell, Tumulus. Let his atoms rest with their radioactive ones. As a Rom who’d also been on the run from monsters as well as the authorities twenty-five years out of twenty-six years of his life, that was almost too many places to count. The sun and the moon had been a challenging bonus.
I had taken him apart. I’d sent piece after piece through each gate simultaneously. Every last part of him. The biggest fragment anyone would find of him would require a microscope to see, if things went as I hoped.
Things, unsurprisingly, did not go as I hoped.
Goodfellow had appeared out of nowhere. He was paler under the green tinted olive skin than I’d ever seen him. “Din jävla idiot . . . you . . . he . . . dritt, dritt, dritt.” He dropped down to sit on the massive coffee table of quartz marble.
He had dropped his face into his hands, muttering, “The Unmaker of the World.” That’d be me.
“And the Destroyer of All Worlds,” he groaned. I could travel to only two worlds, making that not me.
“Are we keeping count of worlds we can each fuck up?” I’d already holstered my gun. From the manner that Robin’s eyes had raised upward in disbelief (I didn’t know if Zeus or Mount Olympus was that high, but I’d go with it) regarding my idiocy before he had let his head fall forward, bullets were useless anyway.
“If we are keeping count, that’s not fair,” I complained. “If I’d known we were keeping score, I could’ve tried harder.” I didn’t mean it. Not now. There were times in the past, however, that I would’ve meant it and sincerely. But I was better about that these days . . . when it came to targeting entire worlds, if not singular abrasive individuals who pissed me off.
Goodfellow had ignored me and kept on with his monologue of despair. Robin did love his drama. “And I invite you both to the same party.” His fingers were now tightly enmeshed in his curly brown hair and he appeared on the verge of yanking out a few handfuls. “How could I possibly conceive that was anything other than a trigger for the apocalypse, an RSVP to Armageddon?”
“Not a good idea?” I’d asked. Did he think Loki, god or not, could come back after being separated at what approached the molecular level?
“No. It was not a ‘good idea,’” Loki had said, voice as barren of life as the Dead Sea, his teeth bared the same as an attacking wolf. Out of nowhere he was there. There was nothing similar to the curdled gray/purple/black light show of my gates when I traveled from here to wherever. He had been gone and then he was simply there.
He had then held out one hand in a fist, opened it, and let six crushed bullets cascade in a gleaming pile to the floor below. That answered that question.
“Bullets might not work on your dick, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are a dick,” I’d pointed out.
Standing close in a third point to the triangle of me standing and Robin, who on hearing that, was no longer sitting on the table, but had fallen onto his back, groaning. It wasn’t a melodramatic groan, as usual either. This was a true “how long ago was it that I updated my will” groan. Across the room I’d seen a distracted, who to be fair could be distracted by only one thing, Niko crouched down talking to the other god Thor. He was facedown, situation status quo, and couldn’t be too great at conversation right then, but Nik was trying. My brother had one of his highest level of disappointment expressions in place, but I knew he was thinking how often would he ever meet another god. He wasn’t giving up that easily, although with his e
yebrows in a sharp V and lips curled down in a severe curve when he wasn’t speaking, it was taking obvious effort on his part. That had been fine. If the curtain was going down with Loki, and I had every expectation that it was, I’d rather Nik be disappointed over there than in the line of fire over here.
“Besides, the motherfucker started it,” I had added. I’d been on the edge of death enough times in my life to know that you’ll live or you won’t. Praying won’t help. Begging won’t help, although I never had and never would. You faced your fate and rolled the dice. And on the chance you did die, you made sure you annoyed the hell out of them on your way out. I folded my arms and let remnants of the Auphe left in me flood my eyes an unblinking crimson. Loki had tsunamis to wipe out the world in his eyes. I had the blood of all the world in mine.
It had been a bare flicker that registered on his blank face, but it was there. I’d caught him off guard. The great Loki whose tongue told a million lies, or so said the books, and I’d caught him off guard with a simple playground taunt. I knew it and he knew it. His lip had curled on one side fractionally, almost invisible and almost amused, possibly? He could’ve thought, despite my previous sarcasm mixed with my usual total lack of respect, that I would revert to the threats of an Auphe, every word made of cutting glass and bloody death.
The Auphe, as a rule, hadn’t bothered to verbally torment their prey before eating them. Why would they? Would you bother to threaten your steak or hamburger? But on the rare occasion they’d made an exception, they had been terrifyingly eloquent. Terrifying as threat and promise was the same word and concept in their language. Every word had been the truth, and the truth had also been mentally fragmenting and hideously shocking enough to be a horror inconceivable. Those fractured glass and twisted metal words burrowing into their victim’s brain . . . If you’d had a choice, being eaten alive in silence would’ve been less agonizing.
No Auphe would have told Loki he had a glacier stuck up his conceited ass, you could put fifty on that.
The god’s lips had lowered over the predatory gleam of teeth to press to an invisible seam except for a flash of silver lines, scars, they came and went so quickly I’d thought I’d imagined them. “Did you actually say that I, Loki, God of—”
“Chaos and Mischief. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all got it memorized by now. All bow down. You should add ‘and Bigoted Dickery’ to that, but with the whole trickster, god of lies thing, truth in advertising is probably not a big deal to you.”
I narrowed my eyes as I accused, “And you did fucking start this whole cluster fuck. I hadn’t done a goddamn thing”—for once—“didn’t say word one and you’re in my face telling me exactly how you were going to kill me. Intestines with teeth? That is twisted and more than sick enough for me to take your ass apart molecule by molecule. And, guess what. I’ll do it again. And again. I can keep that up a long, long time. Every time you put yourself back together and pop your psycho, horror show, mind fuck, piece of shit self back here, I’ll take you apart again. I repeat, every . . . fucking . . . time,” I’d growled. “We’ll just have to see who gets tired first.”
Wolf against Lion.
Goodfellow had abruptly sat up, smoothed his hair and stood in time to take in the black of Loki’s eyes suddenly spreading to ebon veins curling in an elaborate pattern, nearly Celtic if the Celt who tattooed it had been on serious acid, on his face, on his neck, and hands. I’d wondered how a god of chaos was so self-contained, calm, and composed despite his completely opposite words. Now I saw. As I had the tall grass between me and the world, Loki had something else. The Wall of Loki, and it had come crashing down. Behind it was more than chaos—there was an insatiable hunger for havoc, pandemonium, destruction, unending devastation.
I had felt it in me, electricity flying through my veins instead of blood, because, for a moment . . . a long moment, I wanted that too.
We both had barriers, nearly unbreachable ones, Loki and I, and wasn’t that a good thing? For the world at large?
“No.” The puck had denied it all with a tone that had made the entire penthouse vibrate, which made Loki’s mild shaking of the floor beneath the two of us appear pretty damn tame. Goodfellow’s wasn’t like that, not like an earthquake, nothing moved, but it could be felt in your bones—the thunder of an overhead killer storm spawning twenty multifunneled F-5 tornados, which are never known for their mercy.
It made it clear that something wicked didn’t this way come—something wicked was already here. I sometimes forgot. Robin wasn’t a god, but he was the second trickster born and over a million years old. He’d mellowed and changed since then, but he’d hinted that at one time he would’ve considered genocide too easy, too boring, a waste of his time. No, not a god—he predated gods.
A god I’d take on. Goodfellow, even if he hadn’t been my friend . . . even as my friend, no fucking way.
“Both of you will be quiet.” He speared me with a quick assessment. I raised my hands in surrender and then put them behind me, linking my fingers, all without a word. A first in my lifetime.
He gave a nod of approval and turned to Loki, planting a finger in his chest the same as I’d done, but with what looked like considerably more force. “You made a vow to me about your behavior at this party. You were bored with that long con you’re running in Vegas, nice disguise by the way if a little over the top—remember: Less is more. You should’ve gone with an alabaster pale tourist in white socks and sandals. Switch to a new one every week as to not arouse suspicion. Then . . . never mind. It’s your con. If you want to be a Native American Fabio, that’s your business. I’ll bet you have a sports car and date strippers constructed in a silicone factory. Ah, youth. Babies. You do so love to show off,” he snorted and then frowned. “Now. Where was I? Ah, Loki, you wanted to show Thor how to ‘drink and whore in a manner befitting gods, not rutting hogs drunk from fallen fermented orchard apples.’”
“That is the worst told of any lie, one without a seed of truth, you bastard of a puck,” Loki refuted instantly. “You blackmailed me. You said you would tell Thor I was the one who cut off Sif’s hair, ‘the golden treasure of his heart.’” I could hear the quotation marks around the golden bit. “Amusing as it was”—a smile appeared, a razor blade scattered path of the wildly immoral showing that there were tricks in him in addition to the chaos and destruction—“making it permanent was a mistake. Now she wears that flea-ridden horsehair wig, and whenever Thor hears her name, the idiot weeps—no, he sobs uncontrollably like a child. Her hair was the only reason he married her, their ‘matched gilded locks.’”
I’d seen the roots on Thor when I stepped over his unconscious body to get into Robin’s penthouse. All my life, when my hair was too long, I handed the scissors to Nik and told him to whack off about four inches; I’d been to a barber only once—a barber, not a nine-hundred-dollar-a-cut salon like Goodfellow—but that didn’t mean I couldn’t identify a truly shitty Clorox DIY job. Gods were freaks, every last one of them.
“You threatened me with that. Do you know what would happen if you dropped the hammer of that revelation on his boulder dense head? It would double the drunken weeping and wailing, and then he’d run home to Daddy Odin, who as my concerned father, would arrange yet another intervention—number six hundred and two.” The grin unholy enough to stop your heart slid away, and he spat, “The senile old shit who can’t remember he is not my father, but my blood brother and that due only to a blackout drunken state celebrating some battle or another. A regret I am bound to for eternity or until I kill the bastard,” he said, the words barely escaping the tight, grimly flattened lips. “I should’ve known better to drink around Odin who, senile or not, was a trickster before I was born. But there was no other choice for me when it came to entertainment as I hadn’t yet glimpsed puberty and wasn’t old enough to be with a woman.”
“How old do you have to be if it’s a horse?” Ah shit. I winced. “Fuck. Compl
etely my fault. It slipped out, autonomic reflex: heart, breathing, sarcasm. Sorry, Robin.” And I was sorry when it came to Robin. Loki, on the other hand or hoof, could suck it.
Goodfellow waved me off, frowning as he tapped his chin silently. Loki looked less forgiving with the temperature around us falling dramatically enough that frost began to form on my best dress Goodwill combat boots. I wasn’t taking the blame on that one.
“Hey, asshole,” I snapped, wriggling cold toes. “When you lie down with stallions, you get up with foals. That was your pervy mistake, not mine.”
I’d used up my one free pass to be a dick, and Robin slapped the back of my head as Niko often did, but Nik did it lightly. Goodfellow wasn’t about lightly. He was about education in one easy lesson. “Ow, what the hell?” I ran my palm over his target, feeling for a bump. Instead I felt a trace of wetness. Yanking my hand back, I glowered at the two small smears of red. “I’m bleeding, you goat humping—”
Shutting me up with one hand covering my face from forehead to chin and one shoving what felt like a napkin in my hand as I was now half-blind, he advised, “Ponder that lesson. Only the first is free. Loki, behave or I’ll whip out one of your IOUs and use you to cool my refrigerator for the next ten years while forcing you to live in the salad crisper for that decade. And I know you would never show me a disrespect so reprehensible as to refuse such a luxuriously decadent housing offer of a host as gracious as I. Finally, from this second on, the both of you will shut up and let me think.”
Which he did, dropping his hand from my face, giving me the gift of vision again. He paced, sat back on the table, staring sightlessly into the distance, stood, and paced some more. “Confusing,” he muttered. “That does sound typical to my repertoire, but I do not remember that at all. And I never forget the more entertaining blackmail I commit. Nor would I forget to not invite the two of you to the same hemisphere, certainly not the same party. There’s entertainment and then there is insanity. Why do I remember Loki asking me in an amusing and humiliating”—he slowed—“manner that he would never employ?” He centered on me. “Why would I insist Niko bring you? You walking into a room where you are bound to cross paths with Loki is the same as you being the Sixth Seal in Revelations—a cataclysmic earthshaking event. The Wrath of God poured upon the dying earth.”