Page 41 of Disabling Relics for Dummies
What the actual fuck? Loki already had his phone out ordering. Why was his seer looking to me instead of him? He was a god, and I didn’t actually have any idea what was going on.
Killian and I sat on my love seat across from Loki and his crew on my couch. Sleipnir and Loki had different hair, but they shared a good bit of their facial features, and Sleipnir was probably bigger than his…mom? What was the term for that?
“Ravyn and Killian, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I really was. I wanted to. Ishouldhave. Valentine was the only one I needed to think I was a warlock after a time. It’s not that I don’t trust you. At first, I thought you would react badly because of the stories told about me. After a while, I knew you wouldn’t. I guess I didn’t because it was just so nice being myself without all the god bullshit. I could be myself without the expectations of being all powerful and the horse shit that is now associated with Loki. Some of those movies aren’t even remotely accurate.”
That made sense, I guess. Reyson reveled in being a god, but Lilith didn’t. She stepped away and retired until she couldn’t anymore. Loki was kind of a strange friot. There were people who thought he was wholly evil, people like me and Killian who found him a little ambiguous, and people who still worshipped him because they thrived on chaos. I could see where he wouldn’t have known where we stood.
“We’re listening, and I haven’t cursed that beautiful cock of yours yet. So set the record straight,” I said.
“For both of us,” Killian said.
“Wait a minute,” I said, thinking back to my history classes. “Isn’t your happy god assmarried?Maybe you should have led with that before you kissed both of us.”
Sleipnir shot Loki this look like he was used to him doing shit like this. Lokiknewhow I felt about cheating. I wasn’t just against getting cheated on. I wasn’t going to do that to another person either. Booting him out of my life was seeming like a good idea.
“Iwasmarried. A very long time ago. She tried to take care of me when they bound me in a cave a tortured me with snake venom, but they murdered our sons right in front of us. They used the entrails of one to bind me. When I was free, she blamed everything on me and left. I ran into her in the sixteenth century. She has a bit of a vampire fetish now.”
“Didn’t all that start because you killed Odin’s son Baldur?” Killian asked.
Loki just shrugged.
“Yeah, I arranged for his son to be killed. One of his sons. Do you know how many of mine those assholes went after?”
“So, tell us the real story,” Killian said.
“I fathered three children with Angrboda. Fenrir could shift into a powerful wolf. Werewolves were already a thing, but they still feared him. His brother, Jormungand, could turn into a serpent, and another god had already created the basilisks. Hel wasn’t dual natured, but her appearance gave them pause. Half of her was beautiful, and the other half resembled a corpse. Still, she was mine, and I loved her. Theystolethem from me, and now all three of them are in the Aether.”
“Isn’t Hel the Goddess of Death?” Killian asked.
“That’s just the horse shit theywantyou to think. There is only one Death, though he goes by many different names throughout history and different cultures. He’s pretty cool, and the bastard owes me two hundred dollars. They tortured all three of them to see how powerful they were, then murdered them. Sleipnir wasn’t killed, but they forced him to be Odin’s pet. All of my children were just as precious as Baldur was to Odin and Frigg. They should have thought about the parental bond before they came for mine.”
That made sense. Reyson would have razed the entire cosmos if someone came after just one person he loved. He hadn’t even met Lilith when he was plotting to do damage to the god who bullied her. Hell, that wasn’t even a god thing. When I was a kid, one of the kindergarten moms threatened to yeet a five-year-old for being mean to her child.
“Okay, so I get your motivations there. How does that tie into the Cult of the Aether Sisters and the box that ended up at my museum?”
“Bjorn and the bear mages were my creations. As you can see, Bjorn is perfectly sane. At first, the bear mages were part of my family, but things quickly changed. They went insane and fucked off to form a cult.”
Okay, we’d gotten this far, and I really wanted one of those cheeseburgers. Unfortunately, the delivery person wasn’t here yet.
“So, why in the actual fuck did you make bear witches, and where were you when they started killing people? And how did that end with Bjorn and your son in a box?” I asked.
I really hoped he had a suitable answer for that.
Chapter33
Killian
Ireally hoped Loki had a decent explanation for all this because I had this nasty feeling in the pit of my gut that all that kissing and those feelings I was having were just him taking the piss. Had one of history's most famous tricksters tricked me? Did he suggest spin the bottle just to fuck with me?
We all saw how Lilith was with her creations. She only wanted to kill them in extreme circumstances, and some of them were dumb enough to attack her. Was Loki like that with his?
“I need to go back to the killing of Baldur. I didn’t do it directly. I tricked someone else into doing it. Those stupid bastards blamed everything on me, but they were actually right that time. They honestly made it easy.
“I could have gone after any of their sons to make my point that I was angry about them messing with my kids, but Baldur was this golden boy. Every god has some form of foresight. He started having dreams of his death. So his mother, Frigg, went around securing oaths from everyone that he wouldn’t be harmed.
“The other gods were so sure nothing was going to happen to him. So they would amuse themselves by throwing weapons at him. It was pretty fucked up. I mean, if you love your kid, you just do not throw sharp things at them or let other people do that.”
I could agree with him on that one. If your son was having visions of his own death, inviting people to throw shit at him was just tempting fate. Gods weren’t immune to fate shite either. Reyson sure got dragged into it.
