I watched the two deities vanish as they walked into the woods, a faint stirring in the local power currents letting me know they had gone off to whatever other planes and dimensions they planned to work in.
“Tyr, I appreciate your help. Whatever your reasons are I know you would have mentioned it if I was expected to pay for the help.” He stumbled up and belched taking a swig out of a bottle of rum.
“Odin’s orders, he figures we’ll never repay the debt owed you and your friends. Though he’s still pissed at your first wife about his eye.” I watched Khan race across the field fronting my house followed closely by my cat and two of the kits from the family of foxes that had made a burrow nearby.
“Marriage of politics, I think. She was a real ball buster from what I recall. Oh, you’re replacing my liquor supply or I will personally freeze everything you try to drink for the next year and will figure out how to bribe Loki into making you his butt monkey. You Æsir drink liquor like others breathe and forget that someone has to pay for it.”
I waved Khan over from across the front field and knelt down to pet Bluff as he butted up against me pushing aside the images of him and Khan stalking and being stalked by the local fox family.
“Alright guys, I need to call my sister and arrange things here to be taken care of for a few days; then we three need to visit the Frost Forge. After that I see which old contact will share information with me. When that’s done, I’ll need to visit some of the locations that Thoth has suggested.”
Tyr finished off a second bottle of rum and produced a bottle of whiskey. I glanced at the bottle and took it away from him, puzzled about how he’d gotten it out of the locked liquor cabinet. A scarlet ’86 mustang convertible pulled up behind my significantly less classy and significantly worse off little Kia. A woman I suppose most men would call beautiful, stepped out of the car.
We were a study in contrast physically. I’m a few hairs over six foot with facial features that managed to look rough and unfinished on a rounded face. My eyes are the dull brown of moist dirt that match my plain brown hair which occasionally takes on copper highlights if I work outside in the sun long enough and a slightly flattened nose. I was built large with the kind of broad shoulders that I’d been told belonged on a football jock not a scholar. My hobby of studying any form of martial arts I could find a free teacher for growing up had kept me in good shape and my muscles well-toned. Even a decade of working a forge every evening doing heavy labor had only added definition instead of bulk, making me look somewhat out of shape in my usual slacks and button up shirts.
My sister on the other hand was five foot seven and checked in at maybe one hundred and sixty pounds of athletic muscles with slender features, red hair, and eyes that changed colors more often than the local weather. Melisande’s eyes were currently a flickering green rimmed in red that told me she was beating a warpath. I could sense the enchantments laid on more than a dozen knives she'd managed to expertly conceal in the deep crimson, low cut, midriff top that her significant endowments were threatening to pop out of, the low-slung black jeans, and the black steel tipped combat boots. I also noted a leather strap running from her right shoulder to her hip that looked suspiciously like a baldric. I felt a sudden flash of guilt about what I did as I grabbed Tyr by his shoulder and threw him towards her. Hey, she was out for blood. There were two of us there and I hadn’t done anything to piss her off this much, even if I wasn’t sure about how she knew him.
My sister barely lost stride as she grabbed his collar and pulled him to the ground. I almost didn’t see her whip the short sword out of the scabbard over her shoulder and thrust it down pining Tyr to the ground by his good hand. A small crimson sphere of flame burst to life over her other hand as she bent down.
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“If you do not tell me where my husband is, I will roast your arm off.”
The threat was delivered without menace but as a simple statement of fact despite the obvious waves of anger I could feel radiating off her. Where I embody the element of ice my sister is fire, and when her temper flared like this, I had no doubt that she could do exactly what she was threatening to do to Tyr. I wasn’t terribly surprised that she recognized Tyr, she wasn’t lacking in metaphysical power, and individuals with a certain level of power tend to recognize each other if they cross paths more than once. What surprised me was that she was asking after her husband. I turned and glanced at Khan raising an eyebrow in question. He took a tentative step toward Melisande and gave a rough chest tearing cough.
“Queen Katarena, I beg you to check your temper. Before you further maim the All-father’s Right Hand, would you mind telling us which of your husbands is missing?”
“Better yet try telling me when she got married.” I commented, until that moment I hadn’t even realized Khan or the others I associated with even knew of my sister except for her relation to me. Hell, I hadn’t even known she had another name or title.
“I’m looking for Loki, he informed me he was going to speak with Tyr and has not been seen since. And dear brother I married him long before either of us were born.” She paused and the look on her face told me she was searching for a way to phrase the words that wouldn’t annoy or anger me. “I requested the others not to mention my ties to them or our ties to you for reasons you should understand.”
I grunted. She had a point. Giving someone information about their past could color their memories. The wrong bit of information could create the basis for a false set of memories. If I’d known a year ago when my memories first started coming back that I was on friendly terms with Odin himself, it wouldn’t have been hard for my mind to create a false set of memories around that. Hells, the false belief I was Odin’s bastard son would have been a pleasant alternative to the truth in some ways.
“I did nothing to the trickster. He told me he wanted me to repair a few things but never appeared to give me the items.” Tyr’s voice was noticeably strained and it was hard not to notice the smell of burning meat.
“Sis, if it’s all the same to you, Tyr is helping me with a problem for the High Council so I need his help right now. Will you please stop cooking his arm from the inside out? I’m not sure how you knew he was here but I needed to talk to you anyways. Can you watch things here for a few days while I try to prevent the planet from falling apart?” I paused looking at the prized bottle of whiskey that I had taken away from Tyr. “Of course, when this is done if he doesn’t replace the liquor he drank today I may let you carve him into as many steaks as you want.” Melisande's eye’s shifted to a clear blue as she looked at Khan.
“Him! The council placed my brother as the Guardian of Earth? Do they have a death wish? That’s, that’s, that’s like a bird asking a cat to watch its nest!” She was laughing full out with her head thrown back causing her considerable chest to bounce and had finally pulled her sword out of Tyr’s arm. Her mirth, like the emotions of any powerful broadcasting empath, was infectious, and so despite the bleeding wound on his arm Tyr was laughing as well. I reached out and smacked his head, forcing his eyes down. Something I'd been doing to men around my sister since she had been in sixth grade.
“I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but Synbel hasn’t told them my actual identity and I’m still waiting on my memories to fully reemerge. Essentially he’s just told them that I’m a talented earthbound soul.”
The High council was one of the most powerful governing bodies in existence, and were responsible for the current order of things to some degree. For a lot of reasons including my habit of making a few of them look like idiots whenever I could, they had an intense, dislike, if not outright hatred, for me. I also suspected there was more to my sister’s comment than that but I wasn’t going to push for details. I’d just get a lot of vague answers that would equate to black is black, white is white, and I know nothing. When Synbel had found me, and triggered the return of my past lives’ memories, he had lied to the Council to keep me on earth and hidden the fact that I had resurfaced with some of my memories. Something that I knew that Khan, Tyr, and the other gods like him, would be happy to keep secret as long as possible just to piss them off. I gestured and everybody headed back into my house, this time through the kitchen door so Tyr wouldn't bleed on my carpets.