Page 8 of Coven Relics
These two. They were hitting me right in the feels. They reminded me of my parents when Ripley and I were kids. We were stubborn kids, and we weren’t about to do anything we didn’t want to do unless we thought it was our idea or a deal was made. My parents weren’t above bribery. They didn’t do it so much now that we were adults, and we lived a few hours away now, but if we needed them, they’d hop a flight and bribe us with adult things if we were being stubborn about something.
I could tell how devoted Loki was to his kids, and I understood how all this mess got started in the first place. Loki craved family. He thought he had it when Odin made him a blood brother, but it was pretty dysfunctional, even by modern-day reality-television standards. Loki had children with Angrboda, and they were slaughtered. He gave birth to Sleipnir himself, and Sleipnir was kept as a pet.
I understood why he created his hybrids and Bjorn. He didn’t make these powerful creatures to be cannon fodder between him and the other gods. Loki wanted a family. It probably hurt him way more than he was showing us that his hybrids betrayed him, and now he would have to personally destroy them if they came back.
I pushed them aside if I had any lingering resentment towards Loki for lying to me, and I didn’t think I did. He was sent to my museum for a reason. If Loki craved being surrounded by people who loved him and would never betray him, then being with a witch wasperfectfor that. Aside from Ripley, Killian was one of the most important people in my life. If Loki had just been fucking with him because he could, I never would have forgiven him. Instead, Loki opened Killian’s bisexual Pandora’s Box because he legitimately cared about him, which meant a lot to me.
After Loki convinced Sleipnir to grab a few pairs of boxers, we finally got to move on. Ripley and I could spend hours trying on clothes. We knew what we liked, and we loved shopping. Killian wanted to look good, but he was all about comfort. He’d gotten that down to an art, and he looked amazing. Loki had his own style, and it was a little flashy and cheeky, but it fit him perfectly.
Sleipnir wasn’t used to clothing in this century, but he didn’t let that bother him. He knew exactly what he did and didn’t like. Loki and I just sat back and let him do his thing, picking out the clothes he wanted to wear. The male shifter who was helping us noped out of the transaction. The whole underwear conversation must have gotten too weird for him.
Sleipnir was doing just fine on his own, but a tiny fox shifter decided to rock up and try to help him. Hit on him was more like it. She had no idea Loki was his mom, and they looked like they were the same age, but yup, she was going there. She was young. She could have been a student at the Academy of the Profane or opted not to go to college and just work instead.
I didn’t fault her for trying. It didn’t matter what your race was. The supernatural community sought out power, whether it was mates or allies. Sleipnir was the son of a god and a shifter in his own right. She wouldn’t have known what kind of shifter he was, but she would have been curious enough to find out and see if she was getting mate vibes off of him.
I wasn’t sure if it was like that for Sleipnir. He wasn’t a shifter in the traditional sense. His father was an actual stallion, and his mother was a god. Nevertheless, he seemed to enjoy the attention of the fox shifter right up until she thought she knew better than him what he wanted to wear.
I’d been watching him pick out clothes long enough to get a pretty good idea of the style he was going for. He liked a muted palette. He chose greys, blacks, and darker greens. I preferred black. Loki was the one that liked lots of color.
“You’d look amazing in this blue and yellow top,” she said with a hair flip.
Oh, my shit. He probably would, but it was very bright, which didn’t seem to be his preference. Sleipnir just grunted and grabbed another grey Henley off of the shelf. Unfortunately, she didn’t take the hint. She kept suggesting colorful clothes to him, and he was getting increasingly annoyed with her.
“So, we’re having this big shifter orgy during the eclipse. You should come,” she said.
Sleipnir turned, and I could tell he was about to say something not very nice. He looked wholly pissed off, though I didn’t know many men whodidn’twant to get invited to a shifter or witch orgy. He opened his mouth when suddenly, every phone in the store started shrieking an alert. His hand went to his belt like he thought he would find a weapon there. I knew I needed to look, but I didn’t. Loki beat me to it. He threw back his head and laughed.
“Poor Valentine is not having a good go of things right now. Your Kaine just put a red alert out for him. He’s offering a reward. Everyone is going to be snitching. I love it.”
I whipped my phone out. Sure enough, there was a photo of Valentine from his website and a big-ass reward. Sleipnir peered over my shoulder.
“This is the man who hurt you and is working with the traitors? He has a face I’d like to put an axe in,” Sleipnir growled.
“Holy shit. That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, fanning myself with my hand.
It was. A big-ass Viking horse shifter threatening to split my cheating ex’s face in half with an axe? Oh, my Lilith, that was like foreplay in some circles. The fox shifter got the hint, or maybe she was just a pacifist and didn’t like axes in faces because she scurried off to help someone else.
“Let’s grab a few more things, and then I think we should stop and get Bjorn and Sleipnir cellphones. I have a feeling we’re going to be splitting up like this often. I can travel instantly, and Sleipnir is the fastest horse in the universe, but we might need tostaysplit up and still be able to communicate.”
“Good idea. Killian hasn’t gotten one yet, either. I can add a line to my plan and get him a free phone. Of course, he’ll want to pay me for the data plan, but that’s fine.”
“Everyone has those boxes, and you keep staring at them. Why are they so important?”
Loki slung an arm around Sleipnir and another around me. Most of Sleipnir’s haul would have to be delivered to my cottage because it was a lot.
“It’s better to show you. You can speak to anyone on the planet that you want to, but no one answers the phone anymore unless they know who is calling because half the time, it’s a car warranty scam or someone claiming to be the IRS, and you’re going to jail unless you send them gift cards. You can find the answer to any question that strikes your fancy, but everyone is looking at cat memes. It’s beautiful. So many possibilities, and it’s been taken over by cats.”
“Sounds like something Freya would do for fun,” Sleipnir said. “Where is she now?”
“I lost track of her long ago, but she sends me postcards. She’s been on this mission for ages. She’s been jumping into babies that would have been stillborn and living like a mortal. You know Freya. She likes to show off. She never tells mewhoshe is when she sends postcards, but it’s generally in an area where I’m hearing rumblings about a particularly extraordinary supernatural. I can’t say for certain it was her, but the stories about the pioneer and early feminist Beatrix Halliwell soundsexactlylike something Freya would do if she were in the body of a witch with witch magic.”
I shrieked. Ripley was going to utterly lose her shit when I told her that. We worked in the buildings she foundedandattended the academy. Neither of us knew her. She died long before we were born, but we were huge fans. She saw a world run by men where she would have just been property and said that didn’t work for her. Beatrix never married or had kids, and that was why my museum eventually ended up with most of her things, but she left behind such a legacy that she didn’t need her descendants telling everyone her shit didn’t stink. Of course, we all knew it didn’t.
“We have a whole exhibit dedicated to her at the museum. Ifinallyfound her lost pendulum. Fucking Dorian Gray was using it to turn up his ceiling fan. Reyson gave him the perfect death, and I honestly couldn’t top it, but I wouldn’t mind if he brought him back to life so I could break his nose again for kidnapping my twin and the whole pendulum thing.”
“Freya completely reinvents herself, and since her essence is in a different vessel than her own, there’s not really any way to tell it’s Freya in there,” Loki said. “She has her little idiosyncrasies that are unique to Freya. So, if you bring me to that wing of your museum when this is over and let me look at the things Beatrix surrounded herself with, I could tell you for sure. But for now, we need to get these cellphones and teach Bjorn and Sleipnir how to use them because, after this rave, Valentine will find out what it’s like to fuck with Vikings.”
I agreed. And that was also one of the sexiest things I’d ever heard.
