Chapter 5
927 Words
Chapter 5“Are you following me?” the girl from the college asks from halfway across the room, her face twisting in horror and disbelief.
Yet I am the one who feels this situation is unreal. I expect her to turn away, but she firms up her stature and stalks forward, proving this situation cannot be happening. I see the card I’d given her now stuck in the side pocket of her purse. She’d touched it, that is good, but she hadn’t accepted help and that is bad.
She looks me over as she gets closer. “Are you one of them too?” Ooh, the distaste she feels practically oozes over her words like acid burning them away. I wonder if her tongue is on fire from speaking with such rancor.
Still, I couldn’t help my own smile. One of them, she had said. Delightful. I could almost squeal. It takes far longer for me to regain my composure than I want. “Am I one of the pompous Greek pantheon?” I let it hang, that question, while I make my expression match her own distaste. “No.” I step around her as though I am making my way to leave. She hasn’t yet accepted my calling card, so I am a free agent acting on my own.
I feel her turn behind me and she meets my pace. “Roman then?”
“Norse,” I respond flatly.
“How many of you are there? Holy crap!”
“You’re in college,” I snap. “You figure it out.” Even as I say it, I’m trying to assimilate the fact that here stood a human in a place where one shouldn’t be and she knew of the existence of the gods. I look at the satyr lying on the floor and began to wonder if I am being messed with. A round of ‘let’s trick the trickster.’
Her bruises sure had looked real.
A glamor spell, I chide myself, a simple cover incantation by someone who didn’t have to pay for magic.
A thought comes and I swivel so quickly on the waxed floor that my shoes squeak. The college girl nearly runs into me. I want to grab a handful of her hair, those strands which mock the Valkyries, but I catch myself. Still, my hand is raised and I am distracted by my thoughts enough that I’m not paying attention to my movements. I pick a tress of her blond hair, the color that would make the Valkyries jealous, and twist it around my finger. At the feel of its silken softness, I lean in and raise it to my nose. She’d used a peach scented shampoo that morning.
Her hand comes to my wrist. “Hey, excuse me, personal much.”
I let the twist of hair glide off my finger as I smile at her. “Yes, I do suppose it is. So now go back to whoever hired you to get into my business and let him know I have boundary issues.” I step back, taking a quick look around at all the people watching us as we stand in the middle of a now empty dance floor though the music still pulses. “It’ll take more than flaxen hair to divert me again.”
Remember when I said that gods do not get embarrassed? They also don’t feel fear. Yet that is exactly what I have to shove back down as I suffer knee-deep within its power. I hope scared tentacles of this nether sea I in which I swim don’t actually reach my eyes for her to see reflecting there. I also implore that whoever has this human enslaved isn’t watching me through her eyes; another simple spell for those so inclined. Damn! I’ve revealed more in these scant moments than I wish.
I take a steady pace to the door. I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Dare I say that I’ve gotten cocky even? No, surely not that far.
Oh, but I have.
I hadn’t waited for the calling card. I’d just assumed. That left an unprotected rear flank, an open hole allowing for attack.
I refuse to kick the door as I reach it, though that is exactly what I want to do. I don’t slam it behind me either. I am Loki of Asgard and I am civilized contrary to what others may say about me.
I see the air sparkling like pogonip fluttering in the breeze. The satyr fairy laughs and dances on his wooden beam above me. I’ve walked into the fairy dust trap I had reminded myself to watch out for as I left. Now I am disregarding my own advice too. Boy, Loki, you are on a roll today, I berate myself.
Taking my scepter in both hands, I blow across the oval piece of my birthplace. A jet of air colder than anything found on earth blasts towards the fairy. The wooden beam beneath him instantly coats with ice and the fairy slips. But before he falls, my ice completely surrounds him. I stop and grin to myself as the little fairy stands frozen halfway through his fall, both feet off the beam, caught in a pedestal of ice.
Damn. I have become cocky.
Plus, now, I have to worry about what effects the fairy has put into his dust and when it will activate. I feel another bout of ‘let’s trick the trickster’ coming on. But whatever the fairy has done pales in comparison to the damage that may have already been done while I was being sidetracked by my own presumptiveness.
I am so close to my goal. What will I do if I have to start over?
I’ll start by kicking the crap out of Hercules for the belly-flop.
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- Writer
