You have to understand that, up until about two seconds ago, I’d been having a really fantastic night.

It took five hours of pretending to fight dragons, but Sigmund’s finally started to relax. He’s sweet and shy and those two friends of his have almost stopped looking at me like ravens circling a carcass. Which fits, given they used to be valkyries, back before Ragnarøkkr. Sigyn’s friends. It’s nice they decided to stick around.

Right now I’m looking forward to that night of Mario Kart and nervous fumbling. Sigmund thinks we’re going back to my place—the one I bought on Wednesday and haven’t seen since the army of decorators got to it—to fuck, but honestly, where’s the fun? Travis could’ve done that. I didn’t invent an entire new identity for a one-night stand.

I’m thinking of my next move as we make our way back to the car. I know Sigmund isn’t totally buying Lain’s kayfabe, but then he never really did and I can work with that. Particularly the part where he’s going along with the ruse in spite of his suspicions. I’ve been struggling with the Big Reveal for a while, and letting Sigmund work it out on his own might be cheating, but cheating is what I do. Besides, Hey, so did I ever tell you about the time I used to be a god? is such an awkward conversation starter.

So I’m busy thinking. Distracted, you could say, which is why I don’t notice Munin until we’re practically standing on top of it.

Well, strictly speaking, it’s standing on top of my car. If it shits on the paint I swear I’m starting a war. If we don’t already have one, that is.

Fuck.

“Uh, why is there a huge crow sitting on your car?”

“Raven.” Munin hates being called a crow; all ravens do.

It’s hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure the fucking thing is grinning. “Found you,” it says.

Sigmund twitches at the words. Mortals can’t hear Munin talk, but Sigmund isn’t quite mortal. He knows he’s missing something, even if he has no idea what.

“Long time no see, you carrion-stinking bag of feathers,” I say, because I’m pretty sure that by this point I’m fucked no matter what I do. “How’s Hugin these days?”

“Lain are you talking to the—”

“Dead,” says Munin. “Like you should be.”

“How ’bout that,” I say. “Guess that völva wasn’t all she was cracked up to be.” Prophecy. Fuck me, but do I hate prophecy.

And then a voice behind me says, “Isn’t it strange how these things turn out.” And any hope I’d been harboring re not being totally fucked goes flying off with Munin in a flurry of black feathers and cawed laughter.

I don’t turn, not at first. It’s funny, in the way that isn’t. I’ve been waiting for this for nearly seventy years. Of course it would be this night, of all nights.

Sigmund is less hesitant, spinning to look at the source of the new voice. His hand is clammy where it’s still clasped in mine, the sweet cloud of self-conscious lust he’s been extruding all night replaced now by sharply spiking anxiety. He knows this is wrong, even if he doesn’t yet know why or how.

“Uh, Lain? Why is there an angry Viking guy with a spear talking in, um, Norwegian?”

That’s . . . unexpected. It’s not Norwegian, it’s Godstongue. Theoretically, everyone hears Godstongue as their native language. Everyone, it seems, except for Sigmund. That bears further investigation. Later. When we’re not about to die.

“Hello, Baldr.” I switch to Godstongue, too. It’s sort of rude, what with Sigmund standing right there, but I get the impression this conversation isn’t going to be something he really wants to hear. That I really want him to hear.

Now I turn. Sigmund’s description is accurate, and Baldr hasn’t bothered to make any concessions to modernity beneath the tunic and the furs. He’d look funny, standing in the middle of a mall parking garage, except for the fact that I’m about ten seconds from shitting myself. He was a kid the last time I saw him, staring down an arrow as I guided his brother’s hand to murder. Baldr then had been pale and scrawny and a bit of a mummy’s boy. Sometime in the last thousand years he grew up. And out. And angry. I guess an age trapped in Hel will do that to a guy.

I should know, after all.

Baldr is holding a spear. It’s not Gungnir—his father’s favorite phallic symbol—but it’d fool most people into thinking that it was. I gather from the fact that he’s holding it at all that this meeting is booked in to be short and violent.

“Liesmith.” My least-favorite kenning, wonderful. Except annoyance is replaced by terror when Baldr’s one golden eye flicks to Sigmund. “And your usurping whore, too. How convenient, when it was her who lead us to you.”

Shit. Sig’s near-death experience in the Járnviðr. I’d felt Sigyn then—bright as a pulsar and as frozen as space—and apparently I hadn’t been the only one. Fuck.

I push Sigmund behind me a bit. “Get in the car,” I say in English. “As soon as he’s distracted, get the fuck out of here. Don’t worry about me.”

“Lain?”

“Just trust me, man.”

There’s something about my voice. Something about the fact that the Weird Shit is officially going down that makes Sigmund nod and start backing off.

“She won’t get far,” Baldr promises, voice flat and certain.

Baldr had a wife once. I didn’t technically kill her, but, then again, I didn’t technically kill him, either.

Still, that’s no excuse for threatening my boyfriend on our first date. “Fuck off, you glass-backed jackass. What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to kill you, slanderer,” Baldr says, picking another nickname I could do without. “Normally, this is a task I would not relish.” He’d almost look regretful, to someone with a strictly theoretical understanding of the term.

“Then there’s no need to start now,” I try. “Turn around, go home. I’m done. I got out, got a new life. That’s what I wanted.” This, perhaps, is true only in retrospect. I hope Baldr doesn’t realize that. Mostly I hope that the fact that he’s still talking might mean I can get out of this without a fight. Maybe.

“Even should I believe them, your lies are meaningless.” Baldr sounds tired, a little bit impatient. Actually, he sounds like his dad. That’s probably not a good sign. “Ásgarðr is suffering. Languishing in twilight while the prophecy of Ragnarøkkr goes unfulfilled. For decades I have searched for the reason this is so. Now that I have my answer, I cannot allow such treachery to go unpunished.”

So. I’m pretty much screwed, then. Fuck.

I give it a shot, anyway. “Kid, prophecy doesn’t work that way. If the golden age hasn’t come, then . . .” It occurs to me, as I say this, that it’s probably about the worst fucking tack I could’ve taken.

“Enough.” Baldr hefts his spear, and I know talking time is done. “If you will not submit quietly then so be it.”

He lunges, but I’m ready for it and feint left. I come up from a roll to see Baldr pulling not-Gungnir out of the concrete a hair shy of the rear bumper of my car. If the sun-kissed little bastard scratches it, I swear I’m going to kill him.

I might have to kill him, anyway. Somehow.

Baldr is big and strong, and his spear is very pointy. He was never much of a warrior, back in the day, but he stands now with confidence and swings his weapon like he means it. I guess he’s learned.

It’s been a good thousand years since I’ve been in melee combat. I hope it’s one of those things you don’t forget, like riding your first great bike, in either the literal or metaphorical sense of the phrase. I guess I’m about to find out.

There’s a place, a sort of nothingspace between the edges of what’s real and what isn’t, and I reach into it. I left two langseax here once, just in case, and I feel for the shape of them in my mind. The bone-carved hilts, the cold kiss of iron. Preserved for a thousand years, ready for my call. I call now, and the blades materialize in my hands. Mostly like I remember, except that they now appear to be on fire. The nothingspace does that. Nothing ever comes back the way it went in.

Flaming daggers I can work with and, when Baldr thrusts forward again, I catch the haft between the backs of the blades and pull downward.

He stumbles, and I leap back in a crouch. It doesn’t buy me much. Baldr’s on the offensive again almost immediately, and I end up doing a weaving dance backward through the parking garage, trying to keep out of range of the spearhead.

Spears have reach, and in the hands of a skilled fighter, they’re fast weapons. But they’re designed for keeping people back, not fighting them up close. If I can get behind the point, I can win.

Plan forming, I feint backward again and wait for Baldr to follow. He does, and halfway through his thrust I pull a wall of fire up between us. It’s been a while since I’ve done something like that and, honestly, I’m glad it works at all. While I’m busy congratulating myself, I leap up onto the roof of one of the cars on Baldr’s right, then use the momentum to bring myself down against his flank.

It works. Just. Baldr’s distracted by the fire, but notices at the last minute and turns, catching me in the side with the haft of not-Gungnir. I hear an awful crack at chest level as the wood connects. The force sends me flying back into the opposite row of cars, but not before my langseax bites flesh.

Baldr gives a roar, and when I look up, he’s clutching his right shoulder.

He’s left-handed, and the cut isn’t deep, so it’s not as good as it could be. Honestly, it’s amazing that I could wound him at all, and even now I feel the Wyrd of my bloodied knife scream from its broken oath. Still. “First blood,” I say, grinning.

Baldr doesn’t take the gloating well, roaring and lunging again. I almost don’t roll out of the way fast enough, not-Gungnir slamming through the hood of the car I’ve already wrecked with the weight of my own impact.

First blood might be mine, but Baldr is starting to fight like he intends to finish. Losing some finesse and making up for it in strength and brutality, and it’s all I can do to keep out of the way of his thrusts. Not to mention that I can see the paint bubble and peel off cars as the guy passes, and I’m pretty sure he’s started to radiate sunlight.

My ribs are definitely cracked. I haven’t breathed since the cave, which is useful, but pain lances into my chest every time I move. Baldr’s had me on the defensive ever since we started, and it occurs to me to wonder why I ever thought I could beat him in a straight-up fight. I’m used to press conferences and board meetings. Not this.

Emboldened by previous successes with calling up walls of fire, I run one along a row of cars. I’m rewarded a moment later with three rather nice explosions. Not movie-huge, but enough to catch Baldr in the backdraft.

It’s about now that two things start to happen. One is that my skin starts itching, all along my back and biceps. I have a tattoo there—hidden under suits and hipster jackets—and it will become important in just a second. First, however, I’m distracted by a flash of bright-sharp terror coming from my left. It’s not Baldr; it’s Sigmund, still hiding amid the cars. He’s wild eyed, breathing heavily, and slightly singed. Shit.

“I told you to get the fuck outta here!”

“Lain!” He panics, looking at something behind me. Shit. I roll, but not fast enough, feeling the tip of not-Gungnir as it slices a thick gash right down my back. Right through the pattern of the ink.

“Guh!”

There’s a trail of purple-black blood leading from where I’m crouched to where Baldr is pulling his spear out of the concrete. The blood sizzles, oxidizing green as it eats holes in the ground. I’m not worried about that, though, or even about the burning pain lancing down my spine. Because now it’s time to pay attention to the itching. The itching that feels like a thousand beetles crawling just beneath my skin. That feels like a promise, like something forgotten. But most of all, that feels like home.

The ground around me starts to crack, and when my hands clench, they feel more like claws.

Baldr notices. His eyes widen as he takes a step backward, muttering a single word.

When I stand up, I’m taller than I was before. When I laugh, I can feel four leather stitches pulling at the corners of my mouth.

“Surprise!” I hear myself say. I’m pretty sure it’s me, though the voice is deeper and rougher than I’m used to. “I made a deal with your father, boy, long before you were ever born. But he’s dead, and his wards no longer hold.” It’s definitely me talking, but the words feel like they’re coming from a very, very long time ago.

Baldr banishes the fear from his eyes and sets his jaw. “Monster!” he says. “My father was a fool. I will not repeat his mistakes.”

He lunges again. This time I don’t bother to dodge, taking the point of his spear straight through the shoulder. It hurts, but it’s nothing compared to the fire burning beneath my skin, and I grab Baldr by the throat before he can pull back.

My lips part, my tongue lolls. Suddenly, I’m very, very hungry . . .

And then Baldr calls down the sun, and the world is filled with light and pain.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I roar, ripping my hand away from molten skin and throwing my arm up against the glare. Except it’s not an arm that comes up; it’s a wing. I have another one, too, and a tail.

( . . . jötunn . . .)

I was about two seconds away from biting Baldr’s throat out. About five from eating his still-beating heart.

Now I remember the reason Odin used to like me.

Baldr is still glowing, clutching at his burnt and blistering throat, staring at me. Kid looks shell-shocked, and for a moment I sympathize. It’s only a moment, though, because I remember Sigmund is still here somewhere and I really doubt the calm is going to last more than the second it takes Baldr to get his breath back. So I do the only sensible thing I can think of, given the situation. I turn tail, literally, and run.

Sigmund is cowering behind a support pillar, trying not to pass out, and I grab him before he can scream.

“Time to go!” I say, because when you’re a seven-foot-tall monster abducting people it’s probably a good idea to explain what you’re doing. I’m surprised when, after one startled instant, Sigmund’s limbs wrap around my neck and waist and he hangs on like a bush tick. He probably needs to. I can run fast like this. Much faster than I’m used to, in a kind of three-limbed loping gait, one arm still holding Sigmund in case he decides to let go.

I don’t bother to check whether Baldr follows. I don’t think he does, and I can see the exit to the parking lot looming up ahead. I jump right over the boom gate, and as soon as I can see the sky I do something I haven’t done in . . . well, honestly, I can’t remember ever having done it quite like this.

I fly.

Getting airborne is easy. It’s just a jump. Staying airborne, on the other hand, is harder. I’m already about four stories up when I realize I have absolutely no fucking idea how any of this works, but my wings apparently do and we continue our arc upward rather than down. Sigmund is screaming in my ear. I think I’m screaming in his, too.

Fortunately, it’s not raining. Unfortunately, it’s windy, especially when we start getting above the buildings, and I drop and rise on the currents, wings flapping like mad and catching the air in ways I don’t understand and can’t predict. I hope Sigmund doesn’t hurl. I hope I don’t hurl. Honestly, I’m not even sure if I can anymore, and right now is absolutely not the time to find out.

It takes me a block or so, but I do get confident in the concept of up, the city sprawling out underneath us like a glittering Hubble photograph. Pandemonium is a planned city—no prizes for guessing whose idea that was—and from here the ley lines built into the avenues and town centers are obvious. They all spiral back to a single building, burning powerful and bright, right in the center of the sprawl.

Lokabrenna HQ. Home. It also happens to be where we’re going. Or will be. Once I can work out down.

My first attempt drops us a good three stories, and Sigmund screams.

“Sorry!” I’m not sure he hears me. The wind up here is ferocious. It’s also freezing, and I’m pretty sure that at least part of Sigmund’s trembling is from the cold rather than from fear. I have to get him somewhere warm and solid. Hell, I have to get me somewhere warm and solid.

My next attempts at descent are smoother, and I peel into the air above LB in a wide spiral. There’s a small garden on the roof, attached to the penthouse, which is where I’m aiming. I’m so busy congratulating myself on my even approach that it doesn’t occur to me that I have no idea how to land until I’m a few hundred feet away. We’re traveling fast and Sigmund has that whole problem of being a squishy, breakable mortal to consider, so I do the best with what I’ve got.

What I’ve got entails leveling off, mostly parallel, a few feet higher than the balcony. As soon as we’re over solid ground, I drop Sigmund. Well, pull him off might be more accurate. High school physics is against me, so I call up some wind—wind is my other thing, after fire, the one everyone forgets about—and have it break his fall. He gives an ungracious yelp and lands awkwardly on his ass, but he doesn’t sound hurt.

I don’t have much time to think about it, though, because suddenly I’m about two seconds away from a date with five feet of concrete.

That hurts.

I hit the ground with a sound like snapping branches and pounded liver, the momentum rolling me head over tail for a good couple of feet. A wall puts a stop to it before the nausea hits, then there’s silence, and the world is a hazy blur of orange and gray and brown.

The first thing I’m really aware of, other than ouch, is something tickling my nose. It takes me a moment to collect myself enough to realize it’s a tail. My tail. Or, more specifically, the fringe of feathers running along the edge of it.

I can’t believe I have a fucking tail.

I’ve come to rest on my back, with my shoulders on the ground and my ass up against the wall. I don’t see anything below the waist I recognize, just skin the color of burnt earth, feathers like fire and ash, and far too many scars. Beneath the feathers, my feet look more like talons, and it occurs to me that this is what I actually, really truly look like. I wasn’t kidding when I told Baldr that I once made a promise to his father. Apparently it’s been so long that I’ve forgotten what it means not to pass as human. To be myself.

To be jötunn.

Right now, being jötunn feels like a world of pain. My left arm is trapped under my shoulders the wrong way in its socket, and even though I don’t remember ever seeing it before, I’m pretty sure my tail isn’t supposed to have that right angle. I can feel the smashed bones and minced internal organs already trying to pull themselves together. Here, of all places, I am powerful. Just . . . not very elegant right now.

Unsteady footsteps begin to make their way toward me across the concrete, and I roll my head down—or up or whichever way it is—in response, some new shape on my skull jarring against the concrete and cutting the motion off halfway. Sigmund, meanwhile, is looking at the crater in the ground and the trail of hissing and spitting blood, eyes and mouth wide, dark circles. He’s also limping. Shit.

He looks up, startled when he sees me looking back at him. “L-Lain?” he tries.

“In a minute, I think,” I manage. It feels like talking through a sponge soaked in blood. Still, Sigmund is limping, so I ask, “Sorry about the landing. Are you okay?”

His eyes get even wider behind thick glasses, eyebrows lifting into a clashing furrow. “Am I . . . ? Are you okay? Should I, uh, call someone?” As soon as he says it, he winces.

“No,” I say. “It looks worse than it is.” This is true. I heal up the big stuff pretty fast, but the bruises and lacerations will be pissing me off for weeks. “Uh. I’m gonna stand up now. You might wanna . . .”

I’m not quite sure how to politely say Turn around in case you hurl, but Sigmund bites his lip and pushes his glasses up his nose, and I know he gets the gist when he squeezes his eyes shut.

Standing up turns out not to be as awful as I’d thought. It’s only really the arm that’s out of place, and I put that right with a loud snap by throwing myself against the wall.

“Okay, done,” I say, flexing my newly mobile hand. Well, claw, really. It’s huge, dark skin turning the color of splotched blood along the fingers. It’s not actually blood, but it is actually a metaphor, and not a very subtle one at that. I sigh.

“Um . . .”

I look up at Sigmund’s voice, and he taps his left collarbone. Frowning, I mimic the gesture and, oh. Right. A good portion of Baldr’s spear is still buried there, though most of the haft has been burnt off. I grab what’s left and pull.

It doesn’t come free without a fight—the skin already starting to heal around it—and, it’s funny. Because it hurts, I know it does, except . . . it doesn’t. Like hitting the ground traveling at a hundred miles hurt but didn’t.

I spent a thousand years in agony, once. I guess all pain since then is just a shadow.

When the spear comes out, the wound begins to ooze again. Sigmund makes a motion to reach for it, then remembers the way the blood eats through metal and concrete and thinks better of it.

“What . . . what are you?” he asks, and I try not to grimace.

“I was sort of hoping we could start with ‘who’ first.”

But Sigmund shakes his head. I’m not sure whether his next words are wondrous or terrifying. Maybe both. “I know who you are,” he says. “I figured that one out when you started fighting the blond guy.”

“Oh.” And, because there’s not really any other answer. “Jötunn. I’m a jötunn.”

“Yo— What now?”

I almost laugh, and Sigmund startles at the aborted sound. “Jötunn. It, uh, it usually gets translated as ‘giant’ ”—Sigmund looks me up and up, I’m taller like this, almost ridiculously so—“but the word means something closer to ‘eater.’ ”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay.” He huddles down into his jacket, trying to hide shivers that are half from shock, half from the wind that blows cold and endless, this high up above the city. The burn holes in Sig’s clothes probably don’t help with the latter. I hope he wasn’t too attached to his outfit, because he’s not going to be wearing it anywhere else.

“Um, we should go inside,” I say, gesturing to the door.

Sigmund nods, sour uncertainty clouding around a frozen core, determined and brave. “This is the LB building, isn’t it?” he says, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “You’re him too, aren’t you?”

I don’t have to ask who he means. “Yeah,” I say. “Sorry.”

“It’s . . . okay, I guess. We kinda figured that out, too.”

I don’t think to ask what he means by “we,” because by now I’ve turned around. There’s a large set of French doors a few feet away that connect the balcony to the penthouse suite on the top floor of the building. The doors, being French, are glass.

And there, right in front of me, is my reflection.

“Holy shit . . .”

I step closer to the doppelgänger, raising my fingers against the image. I have horns. Horns! And, honestly, they’re the least of my problems. Corpse bloat, stitched-shut lips, and dark-ringed, milk-blind eyes, glowing in the night. A crest of long, flame orange feathers in place of hair. More feathers on the outside of my forearms and down the back and inside of my thighs. And those wings. I look like the bastard child of a vulture and a bonfire.

This is what I look like. Minus some recent additions—the stitches, the ruined eyes, the scars—this is what I’ve always looked like. And somehow I’d just . . . forgotten.

“Are . . . are you okay?”

Sigmund’s voice makes me jerk my hand back and half turn, not quite laughing. “Yeah. Yeah it’s just . . . It’s the tattoo,” I say. I can feel it itching, burning bright against dark skin. “It’s a promise I made, ages ago, to . . . to my brother. Blood brother.” This is not quite the right word, but it’s the word the sagas remember, so . . . “It keeps me human. Human-ish.” More than this, at any rate. “But all the scars . . . the wards are breaking. Hence . . .” I make a kind of abortive gesture at myself, and Sigmund nods.

The tattoo really is itching or burning or something, so I reach inside and try and find the end of it. It’s ragged, but there, and I pull. The pain flares up my back and down my arms, and there’s a strange sensation of tightness, but when it’s over I’m just me again. Or Lain. Or . . . someone.

And it’s funny, because I’d thought that being the seven-foot flaming monster felt wrong. But Lain’s skin, now that I’m back inside it, is . . . too tight, somehow. Fragile and soft and alien.

Huh.

I’ll think about it later. Right now, I key in the entry code for the doors, and gesture Sigmund inside. “After you, sir.” I try a grin. Sigmund almost returns it.

Inside, the lights flick on when they see us. The place is sterile like a hotel room but modern and comfortable. The decor is beige and white and tan, trendy and expensive and impersonal. We may as well have just walked into a display at IKEA. Well, millionaire IKEA.

“Is this . . . your house?” Sigmund asks, lost in the alien space. He’s tracking ash over the plush white rug, but I decide not to mention it.

“Nah,” I say. Travis has a mansion in Aldershot, and Lain has an apartment in Torr (or so they tell me). That’s already pretty excessive for a guy who doesn’t sleep, but a house is one of those things people are supposed to have. Actually, I guess I technically have a place back in Ásgarðr, too—I have vague memories of something made from stone and nestled next to water—assuming Baldr hasn’t burned it to the ground by now.

“Nic mostly uses this place,” I say, just to fill the silence. “She works too hard.”

“Oh,” says Sigmund, lost inside the awkward void. He looks around, pushes his glasses up his nose, and finally asks, “So that guy, in the parking garage . . . ?”

“Baldr,” I say.

“Oh,” says Sigmund again. Then, frowning, “Didn’t you, like, kill him?”

So, apparently Sigmund wasn’t being cute or romantic or metaphorical when he said he knew who I was. I’m not used to that. Normal humans don’t notice the Wyrdborn—gods and the like—and I remind myself once more about Sigmund’s tenuous association with normality.

“Um, sort of. Technically, I tricked his brother into doing it.” Poor, blind Höðr. Funny how the whole thing doesn’t seem like such an awesome plan, a thousand-odd years after the fact. Honestly, I’m still a bit confused as to why I ever thought it was going to be an awesome plan.

“Actually,” Sigmund says, as if just remembering something. “Weren’t you supposed to be, like, imprisoned until Armageddon or something? With the snake and the poison and whatever?”

“Ragnarøkkr,” I say. “And yes, I was.”

There are two obvious implications from this, and Sigmund picks them both up. “So, like, the end of the world already happened?” At my nod, he continues, “Weren’t you, like, supposed to die?”

“And now you’re starting to see what Baldr’s problem with me is,” I say, wincing a little. “I’ve sort of been in hiding. In Miðgarðr. For nearly seventy years.”

Sigmund does the backward math. “World War Two,” he says. “The end of the world was World War Two?”

“ ‘Brothers will fight and kill each other, sisters’ children will defile kinship. It is harsh in the world, no man will have mercy on another.’ From the ‘Völuspá,’ ” I add. “I’m paraphrasing a bit, but that was the prophecy. When northern Europe went to war . . .” I shrug. “Apparently it looked good enough for rock and roll. So we went to war too.”

“How come no one noticed?”

I laugh, but it’s not kind. “ ‘No one noticed’? It was the Second World War! Something like sixty million people died in Miðgarðr alone.” Sigmund looks suitably horrified and ashamed—quite likely remembering that his last name is, in fact, Sussman, and his family did move here for a reason—so I let it drop. “Life went on afterward, but it was always supposed to. The Ragnarøkkr was only ever going to be the end of an era, not the end of the world forever and ever amen.” I pause for a minute, then add, “I think that’s why Odin hated it so much. Everything going on without him, and better. This is supposed to be the golden age.”

“So how come you didn’t die?”

I knew it was coming, but I’m still hesitant. “I remember the cave,” I say, voice slow and deliberate. “I remember being chained.

“I remember the chains . . . dissolving. Iron turning back to offal and blood. I remember standing up. I probably laughed . . . And the next thing I remember is waking up on the floor of the cave with a raging headache, the battle already over.” I turn to Sigmund and give him a not-quite smile. “Sigyn, my wife, knocked me out. I found her dead on the battlefield, impaled on Heimdallr’s sword.”

“She took your place?” Sigmund looks surprised. I don’t blame him. Seventy years later and I’m still pretty fucking surprised, too.

I shrug. “I don’t know why. She was dressed as me.” Sigyn hadn’t been beautiful, but she’d looked it, lying there on the battlefield, face smudged with blood and dirt.

Life is cruel.

“Do you miss her?” Sigmund asks. It’s relevant to his current situation, I guess, even if he isn’t yet aware of exactly how much.

It’s a good question, and I don’t have an honest answer to it. I was a pretty lousy husband. “She died for me,” I say finally. “I owe her a blood debt I can’t repay.” I sigh. “I burnt her body, hoping anyone who’d figured out the deception was dead. Then I ran. Ended up in Miðgarðr wandering around a mortal battlefield. Some Allied soldiers found me, sent me to a military hospital.” I’d been pretty out of it. Babbling in a thousand-year-dead tongue, dirty and ragged and thin. I guess they’d figured shell shock, or a camp escapee. “The guy in the bed next to me was an Australian pilot. Burn victim, of all things. He died in the night, but he had a name and an identity, something I didn’t.”

“So you took them.” It sounds so tawdry when Sigmund says it, but I nod. His eyes go wide suddenly, and he falls down onto the neat white leather sofa. It’s been that sort of a day. “Hale. Cameron Hale.”

I nod again. Australia had seemed so far away to me, then. So perfect. So I’d cowered in this dark corner of the world, carving out my own niche, surrounding myself in the wards and leys I’d need to keep hidden from Ásgarðr’s roaming eyes.

“I had to do something with myself when I got here,” I say. “Turns out, I’m excellent at capitalism. Go figure.”

Now it’s Sigmund’s turn to nod, looking down at his ash-smudged hands as if he’s never seen them before. “What I don’t understand,” he says, “is why me? Why choose me? Why even tell me all of this? Surely you don’t have to, right? I mean, you could just, like, wipe my mind or something with magic god powers or whatever?” He looks up, wild eyed, as if the thought only just occurred to him and he’s still digesting its implications.

“Because you’re her,” I tell him. It seems as good an opening as any. “I don’t know how or why, but I can feel it. You’re Sigyn.”

Sigmund goes still at that. I’m not sure what response I was hoping for, but it occurs to me that this probably isn’t going to be it. Too fucking late now, I guess.

“You’ve been hanging out with me because you think I’m your dead wife?” he says, and I take an ill-advised step forward at the tone.

“Sig—”

“No!” he says, standing up. “No, come on man. Give me a— Fuck! Of all the . . . I thought it was about me!” He laughs, but it’s a broken sort of sound. “How fucking stupid was that? I thought . . . Fuck, what does it even matter what I fucking thought!”

He’s angry, bright-dark and flaring. I have no idea why, and, after everything else that’s happened, for some reason this is the thing that scares me. This isn’t supposed to happen. Sigyn is supposed to help when the bad shit goes down, not get angry.

“Sig,” I say. I reach out to touch him, but he jerks away.

“Don’t! Just . . . just don’t. Fuck. I can’t fucking believe—” There are tears in his eyes, and he blinks them away. “Fuck you,” he finally declares.

Then he runs.

“Sigmund!” I’m halfway across the room and halfway through the word when the bathroom door slams. The stark and trendy chrome clock on the wall reads 1:37 a.m.

This was not, in retrospect, how I was planning on spending my Saturday. My fingers itch for a cigarette, but Nic will kill me if I set the detectors off. So I sigh, curse Baldr and the universe, and walk over to the closed bathroom door. I could open it, I suppose, except I don’t. I’m a coward at heart, and I never was very good at this sort of thing.

Instead, I stand in the sterile gulf of a display home I call my penthouse, lean my head against the bathroom door, and listen to Sigmund cry himself to sleep.