Sometimes I pull the Kaiser off the road and run into the grassland, arms out to catch the wind, and let my frenzy free. She is no danger here, even if I lose myself, even if I black out. I fling myself to the earth and laugh as my dragon blazes; I dig fingers into dirt and grin at thunderclouds. When lightning flashes, so do I.
By the end of the summer, I think I’ll call myself Vider Firedottir.
But I miss having a family.
I’ve nowhere I have to go, which feels rather like having nowhere to go, but I decide that only means I make my own destination.
Laufey the Needle said, You are a moment on the path to the end.
Maybe I’ll be many moments.
THIRTEEN.
He finds me the day after I choose to head south and east again, to find work in a city I’ve never seen, the first one that welcomes me.
I’m eating waffles in a tacky all-night joint outside Minnehapolis where the lights buzz and the booths are curling plastic but the waitress’s heavy-lipstick smile is friendly. She recognizes me, which is what happens when you’re the only lady berserker in thirty years, and gets me a coffee on the house. “Looking forward to the dragon hunt,” she says as she sets the mug down, and a local paper, and recommends the waffles.
“When does it air?” I’m in jeans and a T-shirt, no uniform, and I left my iron collar in the ruins of a troll wall.
“Sunsday,” the waitress says.
As she leaves, I wonder if I can convince somebody to let me promote their goods in return for a nice paycheck, like Sean Hardy. It’s not a terrible idea to think I might inspire some little girls. I flip through the newspaper and eat my syrupy breakfast, relishing the pleasant burn of my frenzy as she wakes up to the heat of the coffee pouring down my throat.
The young man who slides in across the booth looks like my fraternal twin.
I hold my frenzy tight against the surge of excitement.
His glass-green eyes are sparkling, and his smile has a wicked curl. He leans his elbows onto the table so that his shoulder and arm muscles flex, pressing at the cotton of his T-shirt.
I grin.
He reaches out and with one finger drags my half-eaten plate of waffles nearer and rolls one up into a waffle burrito. Keeping his eyes on mine, he casually—too casually—eats it one slow bite at a time. Syrup squeezes out the back end, dripping against his pinkie and down his wrist in a dark, sticky line.
So gross, so ridiculous, so stupidly funny.
I laugh.
It’s like when I tossed eggs into Visby Larue’s face and he ate them anyway. Of course, that was Loki, too.
He swallows the last bite with an exaggerated gulp, then grimaces when the paper napkin he uses to wipe up the syrup sticks and tears. I laugh harder, tiny little snickers through my nose and teeth so I’m not cackling loud enough for everybody in the place to hear.
He dips a napkin into my glass of melting ice water and uses it to wash up.
Then he leans back in the booth and regards me quietly. Eyes unblinking. Mouth pink, like he’s been sucking on cherry candy. Delicate, smooth, pale marble statue. Beautiful. Alive again.
“I have something for you,” I say, suddenly nervous and breathless.
He raises his thin blond eyebrows.
Reaching into my jeans pocket, I pull out the apple. It’s been crushed and sat on for weeks and weeks, but shows no bruising or any more ugly wrinkles than before. I offer it balanced on the tips of my fingers.
Loki Changer stares at it, lips parting in surprise. Finally, he blinks.
“You did die for me once this year,” I whisper.
“It was a worthy trick for the god of tricks,” he says, just as softly.
I place the apple on the worn blue table, slip out of the booth, and dig a few notes from my front pocket to pay. Loki tilts his head back to keep watching me, his hands quiet against the table. I say, “I’m going. But you can go with me, if you feel like it.”
Before he can respond, I turn and go, with purpose but not speed, out to the parking lot, where the Kaiser sprawls rusty and glinting with dew in the bright summer morning. I hope he comes. I want him to.
Then his hands are at my waist and his mouth on my neck.
I put a hand in his hair—thin and white-blond, like mine—and I make a fist. He gasps and then laughs, digging his fingers into my hips. “Why do you keep looking this way?” I ask. “It’s strange and only sexy in a weird kind of way.”
He touches his cheek to my ear, slides his arms all the way around me. “Someone told me once that she thinks I change my shape because I want to be loved—and that is true. I do want to be loved. There’s no other reason to live forever. I change all the time, to be what the person I’m with might like best, searching again and again for the shape that fits their desire.”
I wrinkle my nose. “I don’t desire myself, that’s…very narcissistic and skitty. You were closer when you looked like Visby Larue.”
Loki smiles; I feel the shape of it against my ear. “It occurred to me for the first time in my life that I might try looking like the thing I love, and see if the desire shines through.”
Touched, I shove him away and put my butt to the door of the Kaiser. “That’s outrageous, Loki, and….”
He is beautiful, ridiculous, too, and sexy and sharp, with wild hair and shoes made for walking.
I guess that’s how he sees me.
My dragon-frenzy shrugs her shoulders, impatient. I grab the front of his shirt, jerk him forward, and tell him without words exactly how much we’re the same.
THE END
GLORY’S TEETH
By Tessa Gratton
For all the girls who hunger
I am the wolf who swallows the sun.
In the end, when the final battle begins and all this wretched world is dying, I will finally, finally eat him.
Baldur the Beautiful, god of light and hope. Symmetry learned its work from Baldur’s cheeks and nose. His laugh makes your heart wiggle and your hips jump. He is golden and perfect; shades of honey and vivid life, strong shoulders and a miracle of a bottom lip.
I imagine he will taste like apples.
Some mornings, I wake up and all that makes me rise is the promise of that first snap of skin, fresh gush of sweet blood, delicate crunch of bone.
• • •
Today is Sunsday, and he’s on the beach in Venice, risen with the sun to wander over the sand and flirt with the water. Even this early, everything is wildly colorful here: ruffled awnings and stacked, cube houses and mismatched shop fronts closed up with steel doors and chain curtains.
I can smell him through the sunscreen and sweat, seared concrete and salt-stained wind. Coconuts and coffee and fried food and exhaust. Urine and flaking paint, roasted almonds, shampoo, dusty seagull feathers…kelp and some sweet carcass caught in the foam, a dead ocean creature a mile away at least.
Baldur smells like Old Spice over the crisp god-apple blood. I wonder if his berserker boy is shopping for him these days.
Digging into the tight back pocket of my devastatingly short cutoff jeans, I unwrap a square of pink bubblegum and pop it into my mouth. The first bite is terrible: an explosion of tart cherry flavor and bitter chemicals that sticks to the roof of my mouth and the back of my throat, staining my sinuses, ruining my nose.
The second is bad.
The third, tolerable.
The gum masks ninety percent of the scents on the wind, keeps me from going crazy. The older I get, the better I can smell; the better I can smell, the more I can identify. And there are too many things to learn about a person or place through the layers of terrible smells.
This early, there are few people out, only determined walkers and those who’ve been up all night, wandering home now with shoes in hand. Some early surfers to the right of the pier. In my shorties and green halter, I don’t stand out here like I would in New Amsterdam or Westport City. My ankle-high motorcycle boots are hot, though, so I pull free of t
hem before walking over the cool sand toward the god of light.
Sensing me, he turns.
He’s the first thing the rising sun glints against, before rooftops or the fringed palm trees or even the peaks of those mountains around the curve of the bay. It lights up his hair and makes his eyes into golden marbles, just for a flash. Then he smiles, and it finds his blunt, straight teeth. He’s in a white T-shirt and long swimming trunks and pink flip-flops. “Glory!” he calls, waving like a child.
Hunger purrs in my belly. I chew my gum slow and steady.
“Baldur,” I say, keeping my balance on the shifting white sand. I meet him where the beach darkens from the exiting tide. His feet are covered in foam. Mine force water out of the sand in tiny halos of pressure.
“Good to see you, cousin! It’ll be a glorious day.”
“Will it?” I roll the hunk of gum against the back of my teeth, giving my tongue a task.
He only smiles, because every day is glorious to him. He is the sun; he is hope.
I want to chew off his lips.
“Hungry?” he asks, noticing my look. The way his mouth forms the word, as if it is nothing at all, so sensuous and easy, makes my toes curl in the sand.
Ocean wind tugs at my hair, flinging it across my face, so I can hide the snarl I want to offer back. “I am always hungry,” I say, a half-wolf voice thrumming from the back of my throat.
Baldur claps a hand to my bare shoulder. “Let’s go get breakfast then, cos.”
On the way toward a street that’s all drooping cafes and arched coffee shops and hangover bars covered in last night’s streamers, we pass a filthy boy collapsed under an art installation, breathing but barely, reeking of blood and chemicals. Baldur doesn’t seem to notice.
We pass a car with a broken windshield. Baldur’s sky-mirror eyes are on the blushing dawn.
There is a girl climbing out of a taxi with bloodshot eyes. She clearly spent the night in a hospital, from the smells trapped in her hair.
And here is a streak of old vomit, along the stucco alley. Here, graffiti as bright as blood and miracles, all primary colors and rune signs. Here, a woman jogging in Spandex, her sweat smelling like anxiety. Here, a man snapping into a cell phone. Here, another man, older, with sorrow caught in the stains trailing down his hula shirt.
Baldur sighs brightly, his smile at ease.
He draws their attention. The jogger stumbles out of her pace, but a smile tugs at her mouth. The man on the phone trails off mid-word. The sad old man pats his hand over his heart without realizing it.
I stop on the sidewalk beside one of the smooth white pillars holding up a pink building. The god of light walks on a few paces before slowing down and turning with a comical expression of surprise on his face. “Glory?”
Sometimes I want to eat him because he will taste delicious. Sometimes it’s because he makes the world better for everybody, and the world doesn’t deserve to be better.
“See something superior to food?” he asks, spreading his arms to indicate his beautiful self, a golden eyebrow raised meaningfully. He isn’t stupid; he knows what I want from him. He plays with it occasionally, teasing me, daring me. Trusting me.
It’s that trust that tears. I snarl at him, my teeth elongating, my lips thinned out like a dog’s.
I spin on my toes and run.
• • •
It’s Sunsday, so I go to church.
Hardly anybody in all the United States of Asgard would believe that the Fenris Wolf attends church, and especially that her house of choice is a Risen Sun church.
The building rests at a busy intersection in Westport City, built of orange bricks, with a bell tower missing its bell. Cars rush past and people, too, shoppers and commuters, as a few worshippers head up the shallow steps into the atrium, with its plain walls and hollow organ music.
I slip in into the sanctuary to sit in the last pew, breathing hard and hot, glad for the rush of air conditioning raising goose bumps on my bare arms and thighs.
I left my shoes on Venice Beach.
Two thousand miles away from that ocean, in the center of the country, my toes rub the smooth tiled floor, and I tuck my hands between my knees to keep still.
The sanctuary is a great white clamshell: dais and altar of rich peach-colored wood, the pews fan out in seventeen rows full of people. Men and women and children, chatting softly, looking up the pages for the hymns listed beside the piano and the music stands, where the choir will be. Before the service, this organ music is canned, an old circle song I don’t remember the words to.
The air is clean here, smelling of vacuum bags and perfume and sweat and wood polish and brass and hollow bug legs…and I close my eyes tightly, sucking at the dulled gum in my mouth. It’s useless now. I swallow it.
I keep my eyes shut as the celebration begins with song.
The preacher is Jenny Calsdottir, whose mother was Lokiskin and father was Biblist; she dedicated to Baldur before joining up with the Risen Sun, a branch of the Unity church, to preach about the god in everybody and the healing power of prayer. I know this because it’s all on the church website, and I looked her up after my first visit here, a little over two years ago.
It was after Baldur’s infamous disappearance, after those terrible months of fear and suspicion, after the trolls got sick from the Stone Plague, after my mom got her temper in a huge twist and all I could do to relax was stalk boys who reminded me of Baldur. Stalk them and rag them or eat them, but never both, because I don’t rag where I eat.
One was a copper-haired boxer, called Erisk, with a body like Baldur’s and a smile even prettier, but the light in his heart was temper, not sunshine and hope. I found him in an underground match and followed him home, then followed him to his mechanic’s job, then followed him to his girlfriend’s, then home again and to job again and to his grandma’s house, where I decided I would definitely eat him. Then it was Sunsday and I followed him here, where he sang and prayed and stayed after to help move an ancient sofa out of the church basement using those bulging muscles.
Four hours later, I broke into his van and waited, wolflike and bristled and starving, and when he slid open the door, I growled and bit into his neck.
He tasted like beer and power and plastic mats, like hair gel and singing and light. I ate every part of him, no evidence left, nothing for the militia to use, nothing to give his girlfriend or grandma closure. His bones were brittle and hard, his heart hot, his flesh sweet. His copper hair was bright like Baldur’s, his blue eyes shone until I swallowed them.
And the next week, I went back to his church.
I sat among the congregants as Jenny Calsdottir spoke of the power of prayer. She said it does not change your circumstances and it does not change the world; it changes you. I wondered if she would taste good, and after the service, I went into the church basement, where more than half the worshippers had come to eat donuts and drink coffee and lemonade, to chat and laugh and let their kids rush around in chaos, as long as they stayed away from the food tables as they ran.
It smelled like sugar and hope. It was almost exactly like Baldur’s apple-blood scent.
I stared and felt hungry, and there was Jenny, brown curls laced with silver, quiet pink gloss on her mouth, eyes warm, and a donut with cherry sprinkles in her hand. She offered it to me and asked my name, if I was new, if I was hungry.
I said I was always hungry, and she told me maybe she could do something about that.
• • •
Everything is a test of my self-control.
Sunsdays, I go to church with three hundred people who think I’m just a girl with a spiritual void.
Moonsdays, I find a Friggan temple or a food bank or emergency clinic, because it is the Day of Charity in Frig’s honor. I stamp prayer cards or ladle soup or answer phones just steps away from spilled blood, because I can. I can.
Tyrsdays, I look up on the interweave what city the god of justice finds himself in for dispensing wisd
om and law that week. I go there, too, and practice staying away from him—practice knowing exactly where he is but never turning my bike up that street, never shoving through lawspeakers and tyrs and plaintiffs and defendants and professional holmcourt advocates to get to Tyr the Just, with his silver hand.
Odinsdays are the worst: a day for meditation and sacrifice, and I cannot remain still inside a Death Hall or abide the piercing death incense, mint and frankincense and sandalwood and citrus to cut the stink of rot. I’d rather have the rot. And when I think of Odin Alfather, I remember the pain of his boot in my ribs; I remember the disdain of his tongue. On these days, I run and do not stop running, no matter the pinch of my lungs or the ache in my feet. I run as a girl, I run as a wolf, or I kick my motorcycle into gear and let its growl fill my ears and shake my bones.
Thorsdays, I let myself prowl. The Day of Strength is a day I challenge others, not myself, and though the Thunderer’s churches are built of massive rocks with deep foundations, they are strong because his people are strong. Their voices ring out together; their bonds are forged in lightning. The Thunderers do not weaken, because to weaken is to stop growing. To weaken is to betray their god. I prowl among them, flirting with husbands and tempting children, whispering into wives’ ears, any little thing to drive them apart. If they go with me or believe me, I sneer and snap and show them how disloyal, how weak, how unworthy of Thor’s love they are. If they do not, I remember their names. I carve them into mountain granite with my claws.
Freyasday is a day for dancing, for wild, ecstatic dancing where the seethkonas ply their trade. These women prophets are in every city—some talented and able to dance along the threads of Fate, some only drifters in the dance. Some create elaborate rituals, wear catskin gloves, and eat the hearts of birds in a cathedral of trees and sky, lose themselves in Fate as they sing out to Freya the Witch and all their mothers and grandmothers. Others close their eyes inside the walls of a tiny apartment and toss runes. I prefer the seethers who use drums, who welcome the crowd to dance along to the drumbeat and the rhythm of the nine worlds. Dancing like that, blistered and hot and lost, is almost like chewing on Baldur’s heart.