The Pariah Club

A Warlocks of Whitehall Novella

By Steve K Peacock

Published by Magister Books

Copyright © Steve K Peacock

Chapter One

The beer was warm and dusty, but Millie had drunk worse before. At least it was free, so it had that going for it.

She hadn’t seen the club in its prime but seeing the state it was in now didn’t lead her to think that much had really changed. The doors had been kicked in, the work of Whitehall jackboots, but the rest of the wreckage looked like it had settled long ago. There was also a very vocal pigeon nesting in the rafters. Hard to believe this place had been anything but a dive at any point in its life, but maybe she was being uncharitable – a low mood can fester, and the last few days had given those toxic mood mushrooms plenty to chew on.

And, apparently, had done little for her sense of poetic description.

Polishing off her pint, she pulled another one from the belaboured tap behind the dusty bar before grabbing a second glass and pouring a third. She put the fresh glass on the far side of the bar and waited.

After a few minutes, there was a crash from somewhere deeper inside the building. Not that she was an expert or anything, but Millie had broken enough shit in her time to recognise it as the sound of stacked furniture collapsing. There was a beat of silence, then a second crash and a muffled shout.

‘Σκατά!’

Millie removed the second pint and replaced it with a row of shot glasses. Reaching under the bar, she grabbed a bottle whose label was covered in curly letters, popped the top, and filled the waiting glasses. Had to cater to expectations, after all.

A few seconds later, a striking woman emerged from the backrooms. She spotted Millie almost immediately, thin eyebrows rising over the top of a pair of sleek mirror shades. ‘We’re closed.’

‘I guess consider this a lock-in,’ Millie said, gesturing to the line of shots. ‘Your beer is for shit, but your liquor seems decent enough.’

The woman came closer, confident strides tempered with caution. On her head, a patterned scarf rustled as though in a light breeze. She snatched up the first shot and downed it. ‘I appreciate theatrics as much as the next girl, but it’s been a bad week and I’m tired. If you’re here to threaten me, can you get to the point?’

Millie sighed and reached slowly into her back pocket. Though she couldn’t see the woman’s eyes behind her shades, it was clear that they were following her closely. ‘A mutual friend sent me with a message. I mean, I say friend, but really she’s just this scary bitch that’s decided to sort of keep me around, you know what I mean? So, I guess, if this is a threat, don’t kill the messenger, yeah?’

From her pocket, Millie produced a small envelope sealed with a glob of flaking wax. She handed it to the woman who cracked it open, emptying the contents onto her palm. The woman held it at an angle where Millie couldn’t see, but judging from the look on the woman’s face it was something important.

‘Medusa,’ she said eventually, offering Millie her hand to shake.

Millie shook her hand. ‘I know. Millie Thatcher.’

Medusa took her hand back, returning to picking at the object in her palm. ‘Indulge me. Tell me who sent you.’

‘Kaitlyn van Ives,’ Millie said, quietly. Working for van Ives was still a new development, and she had yet to adapt to the fact that it was ok to say you worked for a notorious terrorist. She had managed to live a long time by keeping her head down, it was only natural it would take a while to learn to look up.

But then again, she did enjoy the little flare of mischievous pleasure that was starting to pop up every time she said the name. Made her feel dangerous in a good way.

‘Ah, The Bane,’ Medusa said. ‘Although I wonder if she’s lost the rights to that moniker now, if what I’ve been hearing is true.’

Millie took a gulp of one of her pints, doing her best to look nonchalant – that wasn’t a topic she wanted to get into if she could help it. ‘Look, I’m just the messenger. I was coming up here on business, and when van Ives heard she figured I could drop in and deliver a package. I’m out.’

Medusa chuckled. ‘Business? You’re, like, twelve years old and dressed like an Evanescence music video. What business?’

‘Academic consulting.’

A predatory smile spread across Medusa’s face. ‘I see. Then tell me what you know of this, hmm?’

She slammed her palm down on the bar and pulled it away to reveal an old coin. Millie didn’t recognise it, but she’d been on enough bad dates to boring museums to recognise the hallmarks of antiquity: the imperfect shape, the awkward splits around the circumference from being hammered flat, the off-centre stamping of the design, the uneven colouration. It wasn’t just old, it was ancient.

‘It’s a coin,’ she said after a moment of deep thought.

‘It’s a promise,’ Medusa said, taking the coin between her thumb and forefinger. ‘It just looks like a coin.’

‘Yeah, it really looks like a coin to me.’

Medusa downed another shot. ‘Watch.’

She slipped the coin down on top of her thumb and flicked it up into the air. It didn’t tumble like a modern coin – the balance was poor and it almost lurched over itself on each rotation, the weight being drawn to one edge that was thicker than the others, stalling the rotation and bringing it down like a bullet. It hit the top of the bar and sat there, balanced on its bulbous edge.

‘Cool trick.’

Snatching up the coin, Medusa tossed it twice more, achieving the same result. ‘Very cool trick, yes. Means we have work to do.’

‘We?’ Millie said. ‘Nah, I don’t think so.’

Medusa’s face turned sour. Slowly, she picked up the coin one more time and dropped it into Millie’s drink. A sickly gold flash pierced the mirrored sheen of her shades for a split second. ‘Drink up.’

It wasn’t a request. Millie drank as the woman stared at her, gulping down successive mouthfuls of warm, dusty beer until she felt the coin meet her lips. At that moment, Medusa reached out and pushed the glass down. The coin rattled against the bottom of the glass while Millie caught her breath.

Reaching into the glass, Medusa retrieved the coin and tossed it one more time. Again, it landed on the fat edge. ‘Consider that taking the King’s Shilling. Don’t worry, it won’t take long, then you can go home and shout at van Ives for setting you up like this. It was supposed to be her, but I’ll take whoever I can get.’

For her part, Millie’s feeling of intimidation was already giving way to a cold acceptance. Over the last couple of weeks, the level of excitement in her life had been on a harsh upwards trajectory. Some clever dick had once thrown the old adage of may you live in interesting times her way, and she was sorely considering tracking him down and kicking his balls up into his throat, whether he had meant to curse her or not.

She sighed. ‘If you think forcing me to down some dusty beer is going to get me to roll over all easy like, you don’t know me at all.’

‘Correct,’ Medusa said. ‘I don’t know you, but I do know van Ives. If you’re hanging around with her, then you’re two things: capable and dangerous. I need access to both for what I have planned and, honestly, once you hear my pitch you’re going to want in anyway.’

Millie snorted. ‘That’s an awfully big presumption.’

Medusa polished off the last of the shots. ‘I’m pretty confident.’

‘All right, let’s hear it.’

‘I need someone stand behind me and clap while I kick a god’s teeth down their throat.’

Millie blinked. Twice. ‘Ok, that wasn’t a bad sell.’

*

Millie’s brain struggled to make sense of what Medusa had been saying. Hell, it was difficult enough to believe that Medusa was real at all, but gods? She couldn’t help but acknowledge the weirdness of believing in, you know, actual magic but still getting hung up on other supernatural shit. But then, a lot of what she thought she knew about the world had changed in the last week or so, why should this be any harder to accept? And she definitely did want to see a god get their shit fucked up, who wouldn’t?

Leaving the bar, Medusa had led Millie to a waiting car. It was a stocky black box with wheels half her height, the sort of vehicle that came boxed with a factory fresh chauffeur, though he was nowhere to be found. A retractable step dutifully slid into place as she opened the passenger door, giving her the boost she needed to climb up. Next to her, Medusa was already buckling her seatbelt.

‘You won’t need to do much,’ she said as Millie fastened her own belt. ‘Probably. If you do, something will have gone very wrong.’

‘Then why would van Ives trick me into getting close enough for you to pull that pressgang shit?’

‘I’ve been planning for this day for a long time,’ Medusa said, hands gripping the steering wheel a little too tight. ‘I know where my strengths lie, and I know where I need help. I’ve created a web of favours to call in for just this moment, and unfortunately for you that web has snagged you, my little fly.’

‘See, that right there is a much less appealing sales pitch. Besides, if its someone worth calling in a favour from that you are after, you really don’t want me. I’m not backup material.’

Medusa turned the key. The car roared to life before settling into a bassy rumble. ‘I’m guessing you’ve not worked for van Ives for long.’

‘Not especially.’

‘Give it time, you’ll start to see how much she values the efficient distribution of assets.’

‘I’m an asset now, am I?’

‘Of course you are,’ Medusa said. ‘Kaitlyn van Ives is formidable, but I was under no illusions when I secured her promise of a favour that she would honour the spirit of it. She wouldn’t take that kind of a risk for a cause she didn’t believe in. It’s beneath her.’

‘So, what, I’m here because she’s too important to do this herself?’

‘Oh, definitely. I’ve been alive for a long time, but it’s rare that I come across someone with a feeling of self-importance to rival Kaitlyn van Ives. But that works both ways: she only surrounds herself with people of worth, so I can be sure that if she sent you to wriggle out of her deal, you’re good for it.’

Millie snorted. ‘How long have you known her? Because it can’t be that long if you’re thinking any of that makes me actually worthwhile for your little excursion.’

Medusa’s face fell, dragging her eyebrows down behind her mirror shades. ‘Long enough. And if that’s what you truly believe, why did you agree to come with me?’

‘I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you’re quite fucking scary.’

‘I have noticed,’ Medusa said. ‘But that’s not the reason. If you want to lie about your reasons, that’s your prerogative. Maybe you should think on the real reason though. Don’t get too comfy, it’s not a long drive.’

Within minutes, they were out of the town and into the countryside. The buildings vanished and hills and fields rose in their place. Pushing the car up to the national speed limit, Medusa suddenly swerved down a road barely wider than the vehicle, the branches of the roadside hedges clattering against the windows. It didn’t seem to bother the woman behind the wheel, but Millie found herself squirming.

They crested a small hill and looped back around, coming back towards the town from this rear approach. This time the hedges and hills gave way to the returning buildings.

From the dashboard, an inbuilt GPS blinged a message that she couldn’t understand, but the associated image seemed to say that they were nearing their destination. If that was the case, then they were headed right back to the bar.

Had they just driven around in one pointless circle?

No, wait, there was something off about this…

Her eyes tracked the route as depicted on the satnav, it looked familiar. Leaning forward, she tapped her way through a couple of preference menus to find one that stripped down what topographical data would show on the map – she needed as clear a view of the route as she could get. If this bothered Medusa, she said nothing.

It wasn’t the shortest route – obviously, that would have been staying where they were – but neither had it been the longest. It was weird, slapdash, with odd turns that seemed arbitrary, but looking at it like this…

‘Are you drawing a sigil with a car’s satnav?’

A gentle smile formed on Medusa’s face. ‘Very good! I told you van Ives knows how to spot talent.’

‘I know what I know,’ Millie said. ‘And what I know is that this is a really bloody inconvenient way to sketch a sigil. I don’t recognise it, though.’

‘You wouldn’t, it’s for members only. The inconvenience is part of the point.’

‘Members of what.’

‘You’ll see. We’re here.’

Reversing back into the same space they had left but a few minutes earlier, Millie was still confused until Medusa pulled the handbrake. There was a change in the pressure and a shimmer in the air – like a heat haze but colder, sharper. The bottom dropped out of her stomach and her head span to such a degree that she would have lost her balance had she been standing. As it was, she lolled drunkenly to one side and clonked her head against the window.

Her composure returned from the bottom up, rising from the dark pit of her stomach before banishing the dizziness. She turned towards Medusa only to find her getting out of the car, slamming the door behind her. Walking around the car, the woman stopped in front and beckoned for Millie to follow her. Her legs a little unsteady, Millie climbed down from the passenger seat and followed the woman back into the building.

It smelled different now. Before, the place had been saturated with the dusty smell of abandonment, the musty chill of a building that had suffered the destruction of its purpose. Walking in now, however, there was a warmth that seemed at odds with how the place looked. It was welcoming, and the deeper she went the more it felt like the building was embracing her. By the time they reached the bar area – a walk that felt considerably longer now than it had before – Millie was possibly the most relaxed she had ever been.

But not too relaxed. It was too pure, too fast; it felt predatory, like some Amazonian flower luring insects to their doom with the sweet smell of decay. Her muscles were falling loose, ready for her to lay down and die at the first provocation. She needed to force that feeling back, always be on alert.

That was how you stayed alive.

There was another sensation as they stepped into the main bar area – a tingle that ran down her spine and across the sensitive parts of her lower back. Magic, old and potent, the kind that seeps into the stones at ruined castles. She had felt something like that not too long ago, when she had been in the Vault.

Past the threshold, the bar was not itself anymore. The dusty and rundown social club, battered by Whitehall jackboots, was gone and in its place sat a refugee from the roaring twenties. Luscious crimson curtains covered the walls, perfectly hung in delectable and swooping semicircles. Thick bulbs with chunky filaments spat a soft golden light from art deco sconces, and the worn carpet replaced with darkly varnished maple floorboards.

Instantly, Millie felt unwelcome. This was a high-class establishment, the sort of place where people wore stilettos and glamourous bodycon dresses. No shirt, no shoes, no tomboys. Every fibre of her being told her they’d break out the hunting dogs and run her down like a fox. Or, at least, it did until she got a look at the clientele.

This barroom was bigger than the social club and, while it wasn’t completely packed, it was close to capacity. The sheer variety amongst the people enjoying the ambience was astounding. In a booth on the far side of the room, a group of rowdy Norsemen were singing to themselves, tears streaking the dried muck on their faces. Leaning on the bar, a man with a long red velvet jacket and a beard like dried seaweed was talking to a bald woman with a skull etched onto her scalp. Not a single person matched the décor, which made her feel a little better about herself.

Medusa, quite aptly, snaked through the masses. She shook hands, flashed a few smiles, working the room like a professional. Following in her step, Millie tried not to look in awe of the ease at which the woman played the crowd – anyone can play a room like anyone can play a piano, but this was Mozart-level.

On the right of the bar, a parqueted dancefloor was roped off, a burly man with a white shirt open at the chest and showing off a large tattoo of an eagle was standing guard. Without a word, he stepped aside as Medusa approached, lifting the rope and letting the pair of them enter. Inside, a large circular table awaited them, a dozen seats filled with people who didn’t even bother to turn to look at them.

‘Stand behind my chair,’ Medusa said. ‘Silent and watchful.’

Millie frowned, but for now she could endure being spoken to like a servant. If she had learned one thing from her recent dalliances with wizards, it was that sometimes it is best to hold your tongue until you have a lay of the land. Sounded like common sense, and yet it was still something she struggled with, she had to admit.

Medusa’s chair was the largest, which probably meant she was at the head of the table. In so much as a round table can have a head, anyway. Millie remembered reading once that round meeting tables were meant to portray an air of equality amongst the members, but that sounded like office manager bullshit to her. Every table had a leader, unofficially or not.

The chair screeched over the floor as Medusa sat down, finally drawing the attention of the group assembled around it. At her 4 o’clock, a man in a bone white suit drummed his fingers impatiently on top of a matching top hat. His brow and cheekbones were emphasised with a dusty face paint that clashed with his black skin, making him look gaunt and skeletal.

‘You have arrived late, Gorgo,’ he said, his voice a bassy rumble and heavy with an accent.

Medusa laughed softly. It was unsettling. ‘I am on time, as you well know, Samedi.’

‘It is polite to arrive early,’ Samedi said. He leant forward in his chair, his chin resting above his hat. ‘And to refer to someone by their proper title.’

‘Which I will do, Baron, when you stop calling me by that ridiculous soubriquet,’ Medusa said. ‘Practice what you preach, old man.’

‘Besides, who said she was polite?’ said another, a wiry man to her 9 o’clock. Lithe and handsome, his skin was a little too white, his hair a little too black, and his eyes far too blue.

Another, sitting at 2 o’clock, a woman with a grin like a razor blade, pushed a crimson curl out of her eyes and crossed her arms. ‘You are too quick to make judgements, the lot of you. It is tiresome.’

‘Oh, come now, Jacquie,’ said the wiry man. ‘We all know how you like to jump to conclusions.’

A peal of laughter roared across the table from most of those present, but not Medusa nor the woman Millie now knew to be named Jacquie. The latter’s smile never wavered, however, though her eyes did narrow.

‘You make the same jokes every time,’ Jacquie said. ‘And calling out your laziness never fails to put a spring in my step.’

Another peal of laughter. Millie was clearly missing something here.

Medusa allowed the laughter to continue for a moment and then raised her hand. ‘For once, we have important business to discuss.’

The table quietened and the wiry man lolled back in his chair. ‘We never have important business. That’s the point of us.’

‘We have awaited important business, Laufeyjarson. And it has finally revealed itself.’

With little pageantry, she tossed the coin onto the table. It bounced and skipped for a moment, rolling slowly towards the centre before coming to a halt on its edge.

Laufeyjarson snorted. ‘Huh, well fuck my arse.’

‘Language, Norseman,’ Samedi said. ‘Some respect is due here, is it not?’

Behind Jacquie, a young man leant down out of the shadows and whispered something in the woman’s ear. She waved him away. ‘How auspicious that the founder of our little club would be the first to call in their marker.’

‘And I trust I can count on you all to uphold the oath we made, yes?’ Medusa said.

A wave of carefully disguised unease rippled through the group. Some did a better job of hiding it than others, but it didn’t take a psychic to know that these shady sods had clearly never intended to honour any oath except their own. She could see it in their eyes, the disappointment that whatever was going on here hadn’t happened to them first. What was also clear was that some of them had put more thought into how they would renege on this deal than others.

Laufeyjarson held up his hand, and a woman with the finely sculpted features of old Scandinavia put a drink in it. He flicked a paper umbrella from the glass and took a slow sip. ‘Nah, too suss for me. How do we know you haven’t pulled a fast one here?’

‘A fast one?’ Medusa said with another giggle. ‘This club has existed for over two thousand years and this is the first marker ever called. There’s not a part of that which could be called fast.’

‘Figure of speech, Gorgo,’ Laufeyjarson said, a little pink flushing into his white cheeks.

It was Jacquie’s turn to interrupt now. ‘I said auspicious, not suspicious, Loki. If I were of a mind to accuse our founder of impropriety, and let me assure you I am not, I would have made a point of mentioning how she arrived here with a wizard at her heels.’

Every set of eyes turned on Millie at once and she felt extremely seen. Awkwardly, she raised a hand. ‘Hi.’

‘A wizard?’ Samedi grumbled. He slid his chair back and grabbed a cane from the floor behind him. It was as long as his forearm and carved from ash-black wood. ‘You would bring their odious arcana here, Gorgo?’

‘If it helps, I’m not really much of a wizard in the traditional sense,’ Millie said. ‘Never got on with the pig Latin and the hand wiggling. I prefer runes.’

‘A runeskald?’ Laufeyjarson beamed and slapped his hands on the table. ‘Well now you have my attention Gorgo, you old snake. No doubt she’ll be wanting an autograph. I always love to meet a groupie. Did you bring some paper with you, darling, or will you be wanting my chicken scratch somewhere a little more tender?’

Medusa held out an arm, an attempt to hold Millie back, but the young woman pushed past her and leapt up onto the table in a single bound. It wobbled gently under her as she walked across its surface, before she sat down and crossed her legs right in front of Laufeyjarson. ‘Do you want to say that again?’

Eyes the colour of winter maple narrowed at her, nostrils flaring, the corner of his mouth twisting ever so slightly. He leant forward, his face inches from hers now. ‘On reflection, perhaps not. Never met a runeskald without a bit of fire in their belly, and I see that streak continues unbroken. If you have this one in your corner, Gorgo, then perhaps I’m inclined to hear you out.’

Laufeyjarson sat back in his chair and took a long drag from his drink. The finely sculpted woman emerged from the shadows behind him once again, this time offering a pewter goblet to Millie. She waved it away, much to the woman’s delight.

His chair scraping heavily over the floor, Samedi returned to the table. He kept the cane gripped tightly in his palm. ‘From respect and decency alone, I will listen. But do not think I have discounted the insult of bringing a wizard into these halls.’

‘Be thankful I only brought the one,’ Medusa said. ‘Ms. Thatcher, would you mind getting down from there?’

Millie wasn’t done staring daggers at Laufeyjarson. His stupid fucking smile, so cocky and confident, was tugging at something in her that really wanted to punch him. But she held her nerve, spun up onto her feet, and carefully stomped back across the table to Medusa’s side.

As her feet touched the floor, Jacquie sighed from her side of the table and cradled her chin on her palms, elbows on the table. ‘With the entertainment out of the way, shall we get to business?’

‘Indeed,’ Medusa said. ‘I call to order the first official meeting of the Pariah Club.’

Chapter Two

For such an unusual group, the meeting itself was quite ordinary once they got started, Millie thought. She had expected more in the way of arguments and bombastic posturing, considering the alleged mythological pedigree of everyone involved. Instead, it had quickly descended into the sort of conversation that can only be mustered by people with business degrees or colour-coded credit cards.

She found herself watching the people around the table far more than she was listening to them. The words seemed to matter less than the way they were spoken, and while she was hardly a student of human behaviour, she had a very good sense of when someone was trying to bullshit in her direction – one of the few benefits of having a Tinder account so toxic that it should otherwise be encased in lead.

Laufeyjarson, naturally, was the biggest bullshitter present. At first she thought that everything he said was a lie, but the more she watched him the more she started to believe that the reverse was true. He disguised his truth as lies, slipped them in when people weren’t paying attention, hoping someone would call him out. Medusa would have his support, but he wanted to keep her wriggling on the hook for a bit of fun first.

Jacquie was also on-side, but she was much easier to read as well. The important thing she noticed about this woman, however, was how many of the others at the table turned to her for guidance. Whenever the conversation would deign to become interesting – that is to say, stray towards raised voices or a good old table flipping – a small glance from the woman would usually calm everything down. And when it didn’t, just the once, she removed a black leather glove and placed it in front of her on the table. That, for some reason, worked even better than the glare.

Ultimately, almost all of the table found themselves agreeing with Medusa quite quickly. The men and women that looked to Jacquie all fell in line, and Laufeyjarson and the few free thinkers left ultimately threw their lot in as well, though the Norseman made a proper song and dance of the whole thing. The only holdout at the table was Samedi, and he was adamant he could not be swayed.

The longer the discussion went, the quieter the man’s voice became; it was unnerving. Millie had dated someone like him once, and it hadn’t gone well. You could trust the loud ones – the anger burns bright in people like that, and there are a predictable number of ways such a person can lash out. It’s not pretty, but it’s predictable. The quiet ones stewed, fermented that anger. It was impossible to know what that would mean in the end, and it did wonders for raising the anxiety levels for anyone who had to deal with them.

The way he gripped his cane was unsettling as well.

‘You don’t have to worry,’ someone said from over her right shoulder. She turned and found herself staring at Laufeyjarson’s attendant. ‘They never actually come to blows. At least, not that I’ve seen, and I’ve been to a lot of these meetings.’

Looming out of the darkness behind Laufeyjarson’s chair, the sheer size of the woman had been obscured. Now, however, in the full light of the room, she looked like a Nordic Wonder Woman. Broad shoulders gave way to the toned, corded muscle – practical rather than aesthetic – of a lumberjill. She had the austere sturdiness of an ancient oak too, a fixed point in the universe around which everything else flowed.

That is to say, she looked like she could twist Millie’s head off. Her warm expression, welcoming smile, and demure braid of golden hair did little to protect against that observation.

‘How many?’ Millie found herself asking, her throat suddenly very dry. ‘They meet often?’

The woman shrugged. ‘They meet, like, four or five times each century. Personally, I’ve been at Loki’s side for two hundred years, taking over for my mother.’

‘Two hundred? Huh, everyday my world gets a little bit bigger.’

‘Stick around the Pariahs and that will only speed up,’ the woman said, holding out a strong hand. ‘Liv.’

‘Millie,’ she said, shaking Liv’s hand. It was warm and the strength of her grip made Millie’s palm tingle.

‘Loki likes you,’ Liv said. ‘I don’t think that needs saying, right?’

Millie crossed her arms. ‘Yeah, got to say that I didn’t expect to meet the god of fuckbois today, but hey ho.’

‘He’s not as bad as he likes to make out. His heart is in the right place when he wants it to be, but he does like his games. Took him a century to get his fill of winding me up every other week.’

‘How did you put up with that?’

Liv shrugged. ‘I didn’t at first. Then I realised that he can’t help his nature, letting it eat away at me would be like trying to hold back the tide. Then I realised the real reason he kept doing everything he could to get on my nerves.’

‘Which was?’

‘I was a sounding board,’ Liv said. ‘I’m his thinking-brain human. Like my mother before me, I’m the one that tells him when his practical jokes are going too far. I have the noble and sacred privilege of slapping the prince of Asgard upside his idiotic head when he gets too full of himself.’

Millie found herself smiling. Watching her hand drinks to Laufeyjarson had set her up, in Millie’s mind at least, as some submissive serving wench, but it seemed that the god of fuckbois’ hired help shared in the trickster’s penchant for things being more than they first appeared.

‘A thinking-brain human,’ Millie said. ‘I need to get me one of those.’

Liv peered over the young woman’s shoulder at the gorgon behind. ‘Seems to me like you are one.’

Without thinking, Millie quickly looked over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Things are kind of complicated and uncl—’

‘He wanted me to give you this,’ Liv said, cutting Millie short. Reaching behind her back, the woman pulled a small deck of cards from thin air. With a well-practiced gesture, she fanned them out like a Vegas dealer. ‘A gift for the clever little runeskald, in case she wants to follow the path of her patron,’ she continued, mimicking Laufeyjarson’s voice.

The cards slid back together neatly, and Liv handed them to Millie. She took them, turning them over in her hand a few times. The backs were a dull brown criss-cross pattern, but the faces were etched with an array of runes and symbols – some she recognised and others she had never seen before.

‘A dictionary, of sorts,’ Liv continued in the Norseman’s voice. ‘And a phonebook. In case you want some private tutelage.’

A shiver of cold bile worked its way up Millie’s throat, but she swallowed it back down. ‘Not to give your boss the benefit of the doubt, but I find it hard to believe he sent me a deck of playing cards just to get in my pants.’

‘He’s given considerably worse gifts,’ Liv said, a knowing smirk creasing her face. ‘But, in general, it is probably for the best you don’t take them at face value.’

‘I’ll treasure it,’ Millie said, slipping the deck into a breast pocket. ‘Nothing like tiny textbooks to get a girl going.’

Liv’s smirk became a full-blown smile. ‘I can see why he likes you. I’ll keep him in line, make sure he doesn’t come on too strong.’

‘He can come on as strong as he likes. That shit won’t wash with me.’

‘You’ve got the right temperament for a runeskald. Don’t lose it.’ Liv let out a laugh and made her way back around the table to Laufeyjarson’s side, arriving in time to catch an empty wine glass sent tumbling as the Norseman got to his feet. No, not just him, they were all getting up.

Shit. She had missed the end of the meeting.

Medusa was the last to stand, taking the time to adjust her headscarf and shades. Even once she was standing, she didn’t move until all the others had left, retainers and all, leaving just her and Millie alone by the table.

‘How did you enjoy your introduction to world mythology?’ she asked.

Millie shrugged and crossed her arms again, feeling the deck of cards sitting in her pocket. ‘Not what I was expecting.’

‘The legends tend to mutate with each telling,’ Medusa said, sitting back on the edge of the table. ‘There’s some truth in the sort of bilge you find on Wikipedia, all of it warped over the countless centuries. We were so righteous when we started this little club, you know. But it’s been a long time, a sort of film, a scum, has settled over us all. Not sure I cut through that completely, but I think we mixed things up a little.’

‘We? All I did was get up in a Norwegian douchebag’s face.’

‘What you did was get their attention for me, dragged them out of their torrid little torpors. Knocked some cobwebs loose. Straight out of the stereotypical wizarding playbook, you all have a way of making sure everyone in a room knows you are there. An annoying trait that can be put to good use at times.’

‘I’m getting a little sick of people seeing me as some awkward shit to throw at people to mix things up.’

‘I’m sure you are.’

For a moment, an expression crept out from behind the shades, something warm and very sad. A sort of understanding, Millie supposed, but it didn’t really achieve much. She rolled her eyes at Medusa. ‘Where are you dragging me to next, then?’

‘It’s your turn to drag me, actually,’ Medusa said. She picked up the coin from the table and handed it to Millie. ‘I do need a wizard for more than just making a scene, you know.’

‘Yeah, that’s not the sort of magic I do.’

‘Come on, every wizard can do a simple tracking spell. I knew one years back who would use them to find their car keys.’

Millie’s hand tightened around the coin. ‘Like I said, I’m not much of a wizard.’

And that was, mostly, true. Wingard, her mentor, had certainly tried to teach her the basics but it had never really stuck. She knew the theory of how a tracking spell worked – how you drew a metaphysical connection between an object and its owner, a magical thread that could be followed – but Wingard never trusted her with the practical side of things.

When he let her try her hand at runes, revealing her natural aptitude, none of the books or lessons he had given her could replicate something as simple as a tracking spell. The most fundamental of arcane spells and there was no analogue in the Nordic traditions – she wondered if that meant something.

‘If you wanted me for my magic,’ she continued, ‘then you really should have pushed for van Ives to turn up herself.’

Medusa smiled sweetly. ‘My darling, you are more than capable of this little task. I assure you.’

A fire rose in her belly, burning up into the base of her skull. ‘I’m also getting pretty fucking sick of people telling me what I can and can’t do. I know my potential all too well.’

She didn’t storm out of the room, that would have undercut her rage a little too much, but she very much wanted to. Instead, she slowly and purposefully turned her back on Medusa and walked with stony confidence in the opposite direction. It was vitally important that no-one who could have seen the outburst could call it a temper tantrum.

It was righteous, that’s what it was. A legitimate frustration at being fucking babied by everyone in this ever-growing community that kept forcing itself into her life. She had been perfectly fine getting drunk and kicking ghosts in the bollocks back in London, survived pretty well once Wingard had gotten nabbed, been instrumental in surviving all the shit at the Vault.

No, this frustration was earned and there was no way she was going to give anyone the right to dismiss it as some sort of childish outburst.

The clientele in the main area of the club were not inclined to make space for her on the way out as they had been on the way in. It didn’t take Millie long to start throwing elbows and knees, wedging her way between drunken weirdos who seemed completely blind to her as she passed by. By the time she reached the far side of the room, she was battered and breathless, but also a touch richer – after all, if they were going to ignore her, then they deserved to be shown why that was a bad move.

Picking pockets was not high up on her list of skills to be proud of, but there had been a time where she was particularly hard up and a baseline level of idiot pride wouldn’t allow her to rely on the charity of others. It was another thing she had a natural aptitude for, however, and she had been a very quick learner.

Back then, she targeted money and valuables, but today she had only one goal in mind.

She found a side door and kicked the bar to open it. Her hands were busy flicking an expensive cigarette into her mouth and lighting it – smoke and lighter both professionally pilfered from the unbelievably rude clientele. The tobacco was rich and tightly packed, the lighter one of those expensive things that looked like a plasma torch. Taking the first puff, she felt a little of the rage subside.

‘Do you have a spare?’

Millie’s head snapped sideways. Next to the door, back against the wall and one leg crossed over the other, she saw Jacquie. ‘These are mine.’

‘I know. That’s why I asked for a spare.’

Cautiously, Millie sparked up a second cigarette and passed it to the woman. She sucked it down on one long, uncomfortable drag and dropped the butt. She stomped it out with a tall heel; it must have put six inches on her height.

‘Another?’ Millie said.

‘Please.’

Again, she lit up a cigarette for the woman, but this time she merely held it, letting the smoke waft around her face. ‘You don’t strike me as much of a smoker.’

‘I’m not,’ Jacquie said. ‘Well, I used to be back in the day. Now it’s purely medicinal. For stress. You the same way?’

Millie took a deeper drag. ‘Nah, if that was the case I’d smoke like a fucking chimney.’

‘And who could blame you, I suppose?’

One last long puff and Millie finished her cigarette. She flicked the butt over her shoulder. ‘Look, if you’re hovering around the entrance to give me a pep talk like some Victorian cougar, then—’

‘Having a crisis, are we? I’ve found that people in the midst of such often have an expanded understanding of their importance,’ Jacquie said. Every few seconds, her eyes would flick away from Millie, up the alleyway towards the front of the club. ‘You’re not that interesting.’

‘Charming.’

‘It’s a fact, not an insult. Think it through, I don’t even know you, so why would I be waiting here for a little run in?’

‘Fine. But people have a horrible habit of becoming weirdly interested in me lately.’

Jacquie snorted. ‘Your hair glows in the dark.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Well, it certainly won’t be helping, now will it?’

Millie frowned. ‘And wearing heels tall enough to be seen from space is hardly any more subtle, is it?’

A shadow fell over the woman’s face, and she puffed a blast of smoke from her nostrils. ‘You are making a lot of friends tonight, aren’t you, little runeskald? Jacquie Springkerse, professionally known as Spring-Heeled Jack. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.’

‘Well, that’s pretty fucking disappointing,’ Millie said. ‘I was hoping you’d be The Ripper, give a little twist on the tale.’

That razor-like smile carved its way on Jacquie’s face again, painfully slowly. ‘That would certainly be interesting.’

There was something in Jacquie’s voice at that moment which clawed and scratched at the inside of Millie’s ears. She blinked, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, she took a couple of steps back and turned away, cutting the conversation short. For her part, Jacquie appeared content to sit there in the gentle cloud of smoke forming around her head, terrifying grin piercing the haze.

Millie didn’t dawdle, heading up the alley and back to the car as fast as she could without revealing just how unsettling Jacquie had been.

Once again, Millie’s head was pounding. It was too full of thoughts and complaints. She had to quieten it down.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a metal device, similar in design to a pocketwatch but covered in panels and buttons. It had only been in her possession for a few days, taken from some shitty minion of a shittier bad dude, but it fascinated her. All the little runes, carved onto ceramic plates and arranged in such a way that simple spells could be cast at the push of a button. A quantum leap in a method of magic that had been stagnant for millennia.

She reached the car and sat on the floor by one of the rear wheels. With well-practiced movements, she started popping out the panels and laying them out in front of her, runes facing upwards, arranging them neatly, then slotting them back into place. When the last panel was back in its proper place, she started again, and then again, each time finding that it brought a little more calm to her mind.

And a few more ideas.

After the fourth rebuild, Medusa joined her from inside the club. She watched her for a couple of seconds before she spoke. ‘How you doing?’

Millie didn’t look up. ‘Eat shit.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Medusa said, then flashed a wicked grin. ‘Except for vengeance.’

Millie shrugged. ‘Good for you, but that doesn’t do bugger all for me. I played along with your shitty Shanghai nonsense, and I’m not even sure why I did, but I don’t really care whether van Ives owes you anything. I owe you nothing, and van Ives’ debts don’t transfer to me just because she handed me an envelope.’

‘Agreed,’ Medusa said, the wicked grin barely faltering. ‘I apologise. I’ve lived a long time and one way I’ve done that is by knowing the value of a good asset and how to leverage it. In most cases, I find such assets respond best when they aren’t allowed time to think. I misread you, I think.’

‘I’m not an asset to leverage.’

‘Of course you are, all wizards are. I’m not trying to give you anything as banal as a pep talk to boost your precious little morale. I’m merely stating simple facts: what we are pursuing here is my life’s work, and if I thought for a second that you were incapable of providing the services I need then I would replace you. I haven’t done so, which should tell you that I believe you are.’

‘That’s still a pep talk.’

Medusa shrugged. ‘Look, I don’t need you to do a tracking spell, I just need you to work something out. Every wizard I’ve ever met, once you get past the bluster and bravado, has had one thing in common: a highly analytical mind. Maybe that’s another stereotype, but seeing you work on whatever that thing is would seem to back me up. You can’t do a tracking spell? Fine, don’t. But do something else.’

‘And why should I?’

‘Because you’ve already thought of something, and it would be a shame for it to go to waste.’

That was a better pep talk, Millie had to admit. It was, annoyingly, correct too; an option had crept up on her while she worked on the device, growing in the space left by the diminishing anger and frustration. I wasn’t fully formed, but then her most successful ones rarely seemed to be.

She stood up. ‘Pay me.’

‘I was going to anyway.’

‘And give me the keys, I’ll drive.’

*

It was an awkward drive, especially as Millie didn’t know the city, but eventually she found what she was looking for.

The library was smaller than she had hoped. It had been a long time since she had set foot in one that wasn’t full of dusty magical tomes, but she remembered them as grand affairs with thousands of shelves, a billion books, an aura. This one had a fair few shelves, but there was no aura; the books were just books, devoid of any majesty. It felt so painfully normal, weak, as if it was dying.

But it hadn’t died yet. It would do.

Content to fall into step behind her, Medusa followed as Millie wandered the aisles, feeling out the centre of the building. Once she found it – the shelves devoted roles of microfiche containing decades of local newspapers – she drew a mental line out to each corner of the structure. Taking a small knife from her wallet, she set about carving a series of sigils onto the exposed support beams, doing her best to avoid looking suspicious.

The librarian – a sleepy local lady with hair like a Highland cow after a strong wind – barely looked up when the pair entered and paid even less attention once Millie started her work. Still, it didn’t do to get too complacent about carrying out a bit of casual vandalism.

When she was done, Millie returned to the centre of the space and sat down on the floor. Medusa, for her part, was still content to watch, a confused frown visible over her shades.

‘I thought you couldn’t do tracking spells,’ she said.

Sitting cross-legged, Millie lent forward over her knees. ‘I can’t. Probably. But this isn’t that anyway.’

‘It has the right level of pageantry for a typical mage incantation.’

‘Yeah, all magic has a thing for needlessly ostentatious showmanship. Runework likes to get it all out the way early. Watch.’

With her tiny knife, Millie began to score angular designs into the rough carpet. The blade wasn’t up to the task of slicing through the coarse fibres completely, though some of the more worn areas did surrender at points. It was slow going and she had to go back over the cuts a couple of times, but after about fifteen minutes it began to pay off. The slashes started to light up – slowly at first, an intermittent sputter of soft blue like a dying bulb, then stronger and faster as she cut deeper. Before long, it was enough to make her eyes burn.

But she needed more. Shielding her face with her forearm, she kept cutting, scoring, hacking through the carpet and into the compacted linoleum beneath. The knife turned cold in her hands, the blade skipping over the surface to the sound of ice cracking.

Millie dropped the knife and closed her eyes – she would need both hands for this. Reaching out, she began drawing connections between each of the runes, pulling the frosty power like fragile wires from one symbol to another in the style of an old-fashioned switchboard operator. Give her a looser pair of jeans and a pair of needle-nosed pliers and she could make a serviceable electrician.

The sequence was complex, something half-remembered from a distant lesson on an August afternoon. She remembered more about the reason for ending the lesson early than the lesson itself – she had had a date, a girl with blue hair and a nose that crinkled when she laughed – but Wingard’s tutoring had been solid enough for something to stick.

She made the last connection and held her breath as the bright light gave one final flare and winked out.

Then, everything went dark.

‘Ms Thatcher,’ Medusa said, slowly, quietly. ‘I trust this was intentional?’

Millie shrugged in the darkness. ‘Sure.’

The darkness was humid, sticking to her skin like rainforest air, a veil of gentle pressure pushing against her. She let it inside her, attuned to the currents and the eddies, and searched for the presence that she hoped she had summoned. At first, she thought something had gone wrong, but then she felt a break in the stream, the rock that defined the current.

A pair of eyes opened in front of her. It was impossible to judge the distance without any form of reference, but they appeared like large splinters of chipped ice, almost painted onto the blackness. A pair of silver pupils burrowed their way up to the front and locked onto her.

‘Runeskald of Midgard, by what right do you call upon me?’

The voice had the gravity of a glacier, not booming but crawling its way into her ears, an inevitability that didn’t need to demand her attention. It was understood that it would have it nonetheless.

‘Uh,’ Millie faltered. ‘I need information?’

‘That is a purpose, not a right,’ the voice said. ‘Do you even know whom you have called?’

‘Well, um, I was trying to call up a spirit of intellect.’

The darkness filled with a booming laughter, an avalanche of sound. ‘A mere spirit? Oh, you are in deep, Runeskald, far too deep for one so young and inexperienced. Delicious.’

Millie’s blood ran cold. It was very clear that something had gone wrong, but she couldn’t work out what. Yes, she hadn’t been paying the closest attention in that particular lecture from Wingard, but she would have remembered if whatever he was teaching had come with a caveat that fucking it up could lead to mortal peril.

It was just supposed to be a tiny sprite, a playful little imp that would answer a handful of questions in exchange for an embarrassing secret or a handful of cheap and nasty chocolates. It wasn’t supposed to be this.

‘I seem to have the wrong number,’ she said.

‘The right number at the wrong time, little Runeskald. Things are not as stagnant and becalmed in the other realms as your kind like to believe. Change is slow, I grant you, but it is inevitable.’

‘What are you?’

‘The winner,’ the voice said. ‘I am the spider that ate the spider that ate the spider that ate the spider that ate the spider that ate the spider that ate the spider. If you hoped to conjure little Sigrun, that insignificant speck, you have reached his tomb.’

Wingard had never gotten around to teaching her interplanar politics. He hadn’t even taken the time to really explain that there was more than one plane. If she’d known this was a possibility…

But then, that was the real problem, wasn’t it? Jumping into something without knowing all the variables. Lazy, very lazy. Coasting on what little talent she had alone was rapidly losing its effectiveness. And now she was going to die because she’d accidentally dialled an interdimensional collect call to the fucking Edgelord of Darkness.

She needed to take a moment, wrack her brain, stop worrying about what she didn’t know here and focus on what she did.

‘I know that I’m not supposed to say your name,’ she said. A spike of fear was scraping up her spine ever so slowly – it had started just above her hips and was now a quarter of the way further up. ‘And I know that you know things.’

‘Things that you would have me share, as all would. The greed of you! To demand your pick of my treasures so brazenly! And I am to allow this, am I?’

The fear crept a little higher and then, unexpectedly, it bit into her flesh. Millie felt a trickle of blood, wet against her skin, and she realised that it had been more that fear – it had been a finger. It slid up faster now, leaving what she was sure would be sore scratch marks, and snaked over her ear. It came to a rest on the corner of her eye, gently hooking into where her eyelids met.

‘You… you can’t hurt me,’ Millie whispered. ‘There are rules, and I know them. If I know them, I’m protected, and you know whether I know them. Am I lying?’

She knew the rules for the spirit she had been intending to conjure, and now all she had was hope that they applied to the thing that took its place.

There was a cold pause. ‘You are not.’

‘So, that means—’

‘But you are not confident you know them all,’ the voice interrupted. ‘Therefore, how can you be sure you know any at all? And if that is the case…’

The hooked finger pulled a little tighter, sank a little deeper. Millie could feel the point of it pressing against her eye itself now, angled to slip between it and the bone of the socket. Tears were welling up. ‘M-maybe I don’t know them all, but I know enough. I’m sure I do. I know you can’t hurt me unless I let you, and I fucking won’t be doing that.’

‘Then why are you scared, little one?’

‘I think that’s obvious, you creepy bitch.’

The voice let out a sound like an iceberg being cleaved in half – a laugh of a sort. ‘False bravado. Counterfeit confidence. I see through you, straight to the bone.’

The needle-like finger continued another millimetre. Millie couldn’t help it now, she reached up to grab at it. Her hand wrapped around a spindly set of ice-cold bones, unnaturally still, and gripped them tight. ‘You have to tell me things I don’t know. That’s the rule. You have to. You have to.’

‘I KNOW THE RULES.’ The finger receded a little, lessening Millie’s discomfort. ‘There are so many things you do not know.’

‘The-the woman I am with,’ Millie stuttered. That false bravado it had accused her of conjuring was beginning to ebb. ‘She, uh… There’s someone she wants to find, someone that has been out of reach for a long time. But now they aren’t. I need to know how to find them. Tell me?’

Again, another cold pause, this one longer and even more unsettling. ‘A direct question. Curse you, gluttonous little Runeskald. Thrice may you be cursed.’

Millie realised she had stopped breathing. The air had frozen in her lungs, causing her chest to feel heavy and her throat to burn. The last embers of bravery were winking out in her heart, choking against the blackness. ‘Just answer the question. I know the price.’

‘A secret for a secret. A treasure for a treasure. Like-as-like a trade is made, never to be undone.’

Sparks flashed in front of Millie as the finger plunged deep into the meat behind her eye. It traced along her optic nerve and sank deep into the grey matter at its terminus.

Millie awoke screaming, a migraine crackling in the dark spaces deep in her head. The blackness was gone, and in its place she saw the confused and worried face of Medusa staring down at her. Behind her, the librarian was finally scuttling towards them from her desk.

Medusa offered Millie a hand, lifting her to her feet. ‘You good?’

There was a spike of cold pain in Millie’s head, but she nodded. ‘I will be. I know where your target is.’

‘You sure?’

Screwing her eyes shut again, Millie nodded once more. She needed a drink, or a smoke, or any ill-advised vice that might distract her from the pain. Her throat was dry and her fingers were beginning to tremble. ‘Can you give me a minute?’

‘Sure,’ Medusa said, a small frown creeping over the top of her shades. ‘Someone needs to deal with the librarian, after all.’

With barely a second of preparation, the woman spun on her heel and intercepted the librarian. She met the other woman’s bluster with an equal level of charisma, knocking it aside and putting her on the defensive, a move that was clearly the result of years of practice. Millie knew she could handle it.

Stumbling, Millie vanished into the bookshelves and towards the back wall, following it to the toilets. Locking herself into a cubicle, she sat on the closed seat and let the emotions out. Deep, silent, painful sobs wrenching at her throat and dangerously close to pumping the bile from her stomach.

The pain was almost gone now, and in its place she felt the knowledge she had asked for take shape. She had known it from the moment she had woken up but now she felt it, a living fact setting up shop in a vacated lot.

She cried herself out – the wandering streaks of eyeliner would just add to her aesthetic, she was sure. Her stomach started to settle and she let her head fall back against the cold tiled wall, letting the world slow down around her, reaching a more manageable speed.

What the hell had she done?

Proved something to herself, that’s what. Proved that she was going to get herself killed one of these days if she didn’t crack a bloody book once in a while. Times were changing around her, and she had to change with them. Own the trauma, move on, be prepared.

At least the terror hadn’t been for nothing, she did get the information she was after. Take the win, move on.

Move on from whatever memories she had sacrificed in exchange, what moments of her life the One That Should Not Be Named took from her. It’s not like she would be able to miss them anyway – the excision was surgical.

She twisted the cold tap on one of the sinks, washed her face, wet her hair, and put her walls back up.

‘Okay, you self-destructive bitch,’ she said, staring down her reflection in the cloudy mirror above the sink. ‘Save the tears for bedtime, and fucking grow up. Let’s go.’

Chapter Three

Medusa had paid off the librarian with more money than Millie would probably ever see in her life and was waiting for her in the car. Millie gave her the address and threw herself face down onto the backseat, pressing her eyes into the leather. After a moment, she felt something bounce next to her face – a pair of aviator sunglasses with smoky lenses.

‘I always carry spares,’ Medusa said from the driver’s seat. ‘And I know the look of someone about to have a bitch of a migraine.’

With a small grumble, Millie slipped on the glasses. ‘Thanks. You got a plan?’

‘I’ve got many,’ Medusa said, slipping the car in gear and hitting the gas. ‘I’ve spent millennia planning. But I’ve never needed anything more complicated than going to where she is and doing what needs to be done. I just had to wait for my time.’

‘You couldn’t just track down your god and beat her ass before now?’

‘No.’

‘That’s it, is it? No?’ Millie said, hauling herself upright and finally fastening her seatbelt. ‘Just one fucking word to the person who risked life and limb to get you the information you wanted?’

‘I didn’t ask you to risk your life.’

‘Yeah, nah, you didn’t directly. But there was a bit of a nudge there, a shove.’

‘Christ, it must be exhausting in that head of yours, Thatcher.’

‘I try to spend as little time there as possible, if I’m honest.’

‘See, exhausting,’ Medusa said. ‘What do you know about how I ended up like this?’

Millie shrugged. ‘I think we watched Jason and the Argonauts in Year 2 once.’

‘That’s not the same story.’

‘Weren’t you in that one?’

There was a long sigh from the front of the car. ‘Okay, let’s start fresh. What do you know of Athena?’

‘Greek goddess. One of the sexy ones but not the sexy one. Liked owls. That who you’re planning on smacking about?’

‘The goddess of war and wisdom,’ Medusa said. ‘And a petty little shit who has been hiding from her just desserts for centuries. Yes, she’s the one I intend to smack about.’

‘Fine, but why did it take so long?’

‘She was out of my reach.’

Millie leant forward, placing her forehead against the seat in front of her with consternation. ‘Oh my god, can you just speak plainly?’

‘She fucked off to the gods’ hidden sanctuary on Olympus and I don’t get to go there because I’m not a pissing god!’ Medusa snapped. ‘That clear enough for you?’

‘Not really.’

‘Well, it’s as much as you are getting.’

A tiny smile tickled the corners of Millie’s mouth. ‘That must sting a little, getting the door slammed in your face like that.’

Medusa’s reply was sharp, clipped. ‘That door was never open for me.’

‘But you wanted it to be.’

‘I wanted a lot of things,’ Medusa said, her voice suddenly quieter and a little soulful. ‘No use dwelling. What’s important is she hurt me, turned me into this. She’s known this day was coming for thousands of years, that’s why she’s been hiding from me.’

‘Long time to hold a grudge. I fell out with a girl at school when I was six and she still calls me a cunt on Facebook once a month, but I think you’ve got her beat.’

There was a long, unhappy silence from Medusa. It amazed Millie how easy the woman was to read despite the large glasses now. Perhaps being in her vicinity for so long had let her attune to the woman’s mannerism or something. Or maybe it was just that the woman clearly had big feelings and it was impossible not to feel them alongside her.

Thousands of years of hate. That was a lot for Millie to get her head around. She herself had built up a pretty big hatred of Whitehall over the years – name a wizard who hadn’t – but it had only burned for the first year or so following Wingard’s abduction. After that, once she settled into the new status quo of laying somewhat low and looking over her shoulder, the feeling had frozen over. Where once had been this blaze of wrath and hatred, instead sat a dense ball of dread and disgust.

It had been a necessity to turn down the heat in her chest – that rage needed fuel and it was taking too much to keep it alight. But if Medusa had been stoking a flame like that for however many goddamn millennia, then perhaps it wasn’t smart to poke at her.

And yet, Millie couldn’t help herself.

Medusa was watching her in the rear-view mirror, the odd glimmer of light as they travelled overpowering the shades just enough for a dull ghost of an eye to show up for a second. ‘It’s not far now. Be ready.’

Millie was in no state to be ready – dragging herself upright had been about the limits of her willpower, so even getting out the car when they arrived was going to be too much. She wanted a dark room, a crunch bacon sandwich, and a duvet. She wanted to sleep. But then, she always wanted that – and she always had a way around it.

Her hands found a small pellet in the bottom of her pocket, roughly the size of a peanut. She crushed it between her thumb and forefinger, rubbing them together until the pellet was reduced to a fine paste which she then smeared under her eyes and nose. A pleasant smell – frigid like an arctic stream – wafted up her nose and around her eyes, opening channels and blood vessels. She felt her energy return, her brain fire up once again, and her left leg began to bounce with restless energy.

A rejuvenation rune was a great way to delay the worst of a hangover, so she had figured it would work well on the mental scars of a deal with that nameless thing she had conjured. But it was only a delay – she would have to work through all that later. After she had gone up against a god.

That didn’t feel nearly as weird to think as it should have done. She didn’t like it.

Restless fingers tapped the address she had been given into the map app on her phone. Her data package was for shit, but the GPS managed to overcome that limitation to be borderline useful. Judging from the satellite view, Athena was hiding out in a barn about twenty miles from the nearest proper town, which seemed a little rustic for a god. Tapping through, she found that the property was a short-term holiday rental, done up on the cheap and with only a smattering of poor reviews. Again, not very godly.

Millie started swiping through the pictures. ‘Just curious, but what sort of a person is Athena. Or was she, I guess.’

‘She won’t have changed,’ Medusa said. ‘She was one of the more serious gods, driven and dutiful. But she was warm too, when it suited her. She was a god of war that always knew when best to fight and when to show mercy. Well, almost always. She embodied violence well, I think.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m being poetic, sorry. But what I mean is that she had this way about her, this force of personality, that meant once you had met her, she was always there with you. Her voice, I mean. I never thought of violence as being this hot-headed and passionate thing, but the pull towards that moment. That’s how I remember her, the gentle nudge towards bad decisions.’

Millie nodded. ‘I think I know a few people like that.’

‘I expect you do. But take that feeling and amplify it a hundredfold. Maybe then you’ll understand.’

‘But she’s serious, a no-nonsense kind of person?’

‘Yes,’ Medusa said. ‘Even her frivolities were calculated to some degree, just to make sure she was never on the back foot.’

And yet here she was, Millie thought, kicking back in a cut-price holiday rental in the Scottish countryside? It wasn’t even listed on a reputable site, just some shonky page that looked like it had been put together by a neural net force fed 90’s geocities websites. The URL even ended in .tk, which didn’t exactly instil confidence in a business. A red exclamation mark in the corner of her browser informed her that it had blocked fourteen suspicious pop-ups so far alone.

The listing couldn’t have been any more a red flag than if it had been for a literal warehouse full of physical red flags. She could buy a little technological illiteracy from a two-thousand-year-old warrior goddess, but she supposedly had wisdom in her portfolio. Granted, Millie wasn’t really sure what wisdom actually meant, but she had to believe it would give someone enough nouse not to book a holiday from the sort of website HH Holmes would have put together if he’d been born a century later.

They turned off a country road and onto something that barely qualified as a path. The car rattled over the uneven ground, and Medusa was forced to drive at little more than a walking pace. Still, the car complained loud enough that it wasn’t long before they ditched it and decided to travel the rest of the way on foot.

Millie was a city girl through and through, but even she had to admit that the Scottish countryside was hard to beat. The highlands towered in the distance and, even with the magically masked headache quietly thumping away behind her eyes, she couldn’t find it in her to complain about walking when she had a view like that. It had been the same when they had raided The Vault.

Scotland was insidiously pretty. It caught her off guard, distracted her. Even Medusa, as focused as she was, would take a moment to glance at the view – no doubt she would spin it as scouting for trouble, but Millie wasn’t buying that.

Eventually, the path opened out to the redecorated cottage she had seen on the website. Once a stone-walled, thatched-roof relic of the romanticised days of yore, someone had gone to great lengths to graft the modern day onto the poor building like some architectural Dr Moreau. It hadn’t been so much a renovation as it had been an infection, plate glass windows jammed into wooden frames, the pain still peeling. A skylight had been hacked into the roof and the weathered door of thick wood she had expected had been replaced with the dowdy and dispiriting plastic façade so common on council houses.

Parked up against the front wall, an old 4x4 had rusted its way into being a fossil. That had been mentioned in one of the reviews, so probably nothing to do with Athena. In fact, there was no indication that the cottage had been inhabited recently at all.

Millie grabbed Medusa’s collar, pulling her to a stop. ‘I’m calling it, this is a trap.’

‘No,’ Medusa said. ‘She’s here, and there’s no chance she knows we’re coming. Unless you’re saying your information isn’t sound?’

The image of the nameless creature she had communed with flashed inside her mind. Even the memory of it was offended that someone would even ask that question. ‘She’s been here. She may even have been here at the moment I asked for her location, but that doesn’t mean she still is. Look at how fucking creepy the place is!’

‘It looks fine.’

‘It looks tacky as shit. It looks like the sort of place Leatherface would go on holiday when carving hot teenagers in half just got a little too much like hard work. What sort of god would be caught dead here?’

Medusa didn’t answer, she just pulled herself from Millie’s grasp and moved to the front door. Taped to the frame was a small lockbox with three chunky dials. Without any visible display of effort, Medusa wrenched it from the wall, cracked it open, and retrieved a key. ‘Stay behind me and hold these.’

She pulled off her shades and handed them to Millie.

Then the headscarf.

Millie had been expecting the mass of snakes – it wasn’t as if that’s something alien when you are dealing with the literal mythical Medusa – but it still made something in her brain go twang. Maybe it was because she was seeing them from behind, Medusa having hidden her face to take off her glasses, but they didn’t fit. They were supposed to writhe and pulse, slithering and sliding over each other constantly. But they weren’t. Instead, they were largely still, heads darting to new positions in sudden movements, tongues flicking at the air.

The behaviour of a predator on the hunt.

She threw open the door and wasted no time storming the cottage, and though Millie tried to keep up there was a swiftness to the woman that she was unprepared for. Losing track of her immediately, she caught up with Medusa after a few moments, seething quietly in the centre of what had, presumably, once been a dining room.

The furniture had been stripped. In its place, a dozen full length mirrors had been arranged at odd angles, covering every sightline. Millie didn’t even mean to look, but even turning her head in the direction of the room meant that, somehow, she was going to get a good look of Medusa’s face in the reflections – and, finally, her eyes.

They were beautiful. The lizard-like pupils were wrapped by burnt golden irises that crept over the white in exciting veins, like cracks in delicate glass. They shouldn’t have been at home in a human face but seeing them now Millie could think of nowhere else they could have been. That Medusa had to hide them felt like a travesty.

But she did have to hide them.

Oh shit. She wasn’t hiding them.

‘You’re fine,’ Medusa said, not turning around. ‘Doesn’t work on reflections.’

Millie felt a little of the worry drain from her, but she still felt like she should avert her eyes. She didn’t do so, but she felt like she should. ‘So, what are the mirrors for?’

‘She’s taunting me. Reminding me of what she did. Give me my things, she’s not here.’

Medusa snatched the shades and headscarf from Millie’s outstretched hands and whipped them back into place in a practiced motion. The reflections followed suit, but something in one of them caught Millie’s eye.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Can you just wave your hand a second?’

‘What?’

‘Humour me, come on.’

Slowly, Medusa turned around to throw a mean frown her way, but Millie wasn’t watching. Instead, she had her eyes fixed on the mirror behind the woman, on the reflection, on how there was a delay in its movement.

It was only a split second, the barest of hints of a desynchronisation, but she had spotted it. And now, knowing it was there, she could see it in the other mirrors too, a cascade of delays that meant each movement was just a fraction of a second behind the last.

‘Yeah,’ she said, dragging out the word. ‘I’m not really sure how this is a trap, but it’s totally a fucking trap.’

‘Athena is mocking me, and I will not stand for that again.’

Before Millie could stop her, Medusa threw out a foot and shattered one of the mirrors. There was a moment of calm serenity, the fractured glass tinkling gently over itself and onto the floor. The crunch of the small fragments caught in Medusa’s shoe as she brought her foot back to the floor. And then there was a rumble as a spell, one so delicate and finely woven that it hadn’t triggered Millie’s senses, began to collapse in kind.

Feeling it now, the entire thing had been balanced on a knife-edge, a single thin thread holding the entire trap together. She could watch it unravel in real time, the whiplash of such fine magic cutting into her as a result of the tension it had been under. A rope of loose power hit across her lower back, then another across her face, knocking her to the floor. They stung like hell, but weren’t the intention of the spell.

As the last strip of power lashed out, she felt reality start to buckle. Behind the remaining mirrors, the paint began to peel from the walls, revealing something new, a vista she didn’t recognise. She managed to push herself back up to one knee, but the gravity of what she was seeing kept her there – whatever the spell was doing, it didn’t want anyone wandering off until it was done. Medusa still struggled, however, pushing herself forward inch by inch, millimetre by millimetre, towards the boundary of the mirrors.

Once the cottage finished disintegrating, a final pulse of gravity knocked them both prone again.

‘Okay, right,’ Millie said, rolling onto her stomach and resting her aching face on the now-stone floor. ‘It’s time you started listening to the wizard in the room.’

Medusa’s voice came from above her, already on her feet again. ‘This is just another one of her games, another way of mocking me.’

‘Babe, you’re fucking certifiable at this point. Look around you, this is more than mockery.’

‘No, you’re wrong.’

Millie rolled over and stared up at the woman. ‘Prove it.’

‘I don’t have to prove anything to you.’

‘Well, you could have proved you weren’t a grade-A pissbaby and waited for, like, ten seconds after I said there was something weird as fuck before you went all vandal. Seven years of bad luck, starting now.’

‘If you’re not going to take this seriously—’

‘Seriously?’ Millie was climbing up to her feet now. ‘I’m the one who has done all the work here, and it’s not even my vendetta. And seven years of bad luck is not just idle superstition.’

Medusa sighed. ‘No? Then what is it?’

Millie’s heart was pounding in her chest, pushing adrenaline out and making her teeth itch. It wanted her to fight, not just another pointless shouting match. ‘Mirrors and magic are linked. Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most basic bitch of all, that sort of thing. They can bend spells like they bend light, if you know what you’re doing. Judging from all this, your Athena does know what she’s doing.’

There was a tension in the air, one Medusa was not quick to defuse. She let Millie’s words hang there, staring her down with her shaded eyes. Her nostrils were flaring.

Finally, the tension broke, and the woman sank in on herself. ‘Maybe you’re right and this is a trap, but it is also cruel and vicious mockery. That she would pick this place, of all places, as the appearance for whatever sort of trap this is? You can’t get much crueller.’

A breeze danced across the pair of them, bringing with it a sweet and flowery scent with the tell-tale tang of a distilled perfume. Surfing on its tail, a voice followed.

‘I am sorry if you think this setting cruel, Devoted. It is meant to be instructive, nothing more.’

The voice was feminine but deep, a little hoarse, and the accent was unmistakably Greek. No, not just the accent – the words. The voice was speaking in Greek, yet somehow Millie could understand every word. The sounds twisted and reshaped themselves inside her head, letting her hear them in Greek but remember them in English. She didn’t like it.

Millie tried to track the voice back to its source, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once now, the air saturated by the perfume carrying it.

‘You cannot be so removed from the world that you don’t know what bringing me here would do,’ Medusa shouted. ‘Even after all this time, you would still try to hurt me?’

The mirrors shimmered as though the light had shifted in such a way to catch the corner of each of them simultaneously. A figure appeared behind the glass – built like a professional wrestler, her arms sculpted with firm muscles, a strong jaw, thin lips below a button nose. The eyes, so grey as to almost be black, were wide and keen, unbothered by her long dark hair which was scraped back and fastened tight. Her skin, a golden olive, was criss-crossed with faded scars.

‘Is that not what you have been seeking to do all this time?’ Athena said. ‘Please, it is time to let this go.’

‘I’ll decide when it is time for that, and it won’t be before every indignity I have suffered has been revisited upon you by my hand. You don’t get to ask me to drop this because you are scared. I was scared, and what mercy did you grant me?’

‘Medusa…’ Athena’s voice trailed off. She seemed almost distracted, momentarily lost in thought. Then she became alert again. ‘I didn’t craft this as a prison for you, but it can serve as such. It should be a place of reflection, where you can finally come to terms with your pain. When your heart is cleansed, the door will open and I will come to you and we can discuss this at last.’

Millie watched a shiver of cold fury run across Medusa’s skin, twisting her slender frame into a pose with the lithe menace of a masterfully honed rapier. Then she started lashing out, shattering the remaining mirrors one by one. ‘Go fuck yourself, Athena. I’m taking back control.’

As the last mirror splintered, the perfume in the air began to fade. Athena’s face, present on every one of the thousand shards, began to dim as well. Her mouth opened and closed, soundless words lost in the destruction of whatever mechanism was allowing her to communicate. Medusa picked one of the faces and stared it down until it was gone.

‘Be a wizard,’ she said, her voice a ragged whisper. ‘Get us out of here.’

‘I wouldn’t even know how—’

‘Just… Just work it out.’

Glass crunching under her feet, Medusa walked away. She crossed out of the circumference of the broken mirrors, following the stone path. It wound its way up a shallow hillside, surrounded by verdant turf struggling to survive under the harsh sunshine. There was a bench a little way away, carved of white stone and thoughtfully placed in the shade of a small tree. Medusa sat down.

This time, Millie didn’t have the need to try and give the woman a lecture about listening to the wizard. Something was sliding into place now, some puzzle pieces she hadn’t been privy to before. As bright as Millie sometimes decided she was, realising that Medusa had held onto that rage for thousands of years was looking at things from the wrong perspective. She had dismissed the severity of the grudge, and she was starting to see the hints of that now.

Under the tree, Medusa looked tired. Sat with her arms crossed and her head hanging, none of her menace as this ancient angel of vengeance remained. That emptiness was a common sight in the people Millie worked with – even the strongest have their limits, and a stubborn ghost will pluck and pry and needle its way in, right under the skin, until it’s tapping at the raw nerves.

Pure mental anguish could hollow out a person, whether the cause was an actual spectral ghost or a metaphorical ghost from the past. In either case, it left an emotional limbo state that would get its hooks in her every time. Every client, every case, every back-alley tryst, they all started with a face like Medusa’s in that moment.

Millie was committed now.

She closed her eyes and tried to reach out with her senses. Jameson Parker had given her a crash course in this skill lately, picking up where Wingard had left off, but his tutoring had left a little to be desired. It was her fault, of course – the skill was one of the many she had let atrophy after Wingard had been snatched up and her lessons had stopped, and it was not one she had missed.

Instantly, she felt a burn in her fingertips as reached out to caress the flow of energy in the prison. More skilled mages could do this by sight alone, but she needed the tactility to get any understanding – each burning ember a different symphonic note, singeing her in different ways. If she was careful, she could find the seams, widen them.

‘Demiplane,’ she mumbled to herself. ‘Artificially created, but a parasite. Draws from an existing plane… Gravity, oxygen, chemistry… Facsimiles, not creations. Saves energy.’

But what did that mean? She had to broaden it out, not focus on the specifics.

Big spells were hard to maintain, that was obvious. The more energy you need, the faster you burn through it, the shorter the effects of the spell. The more energy efficient, the longer it could be sustained, so you saved energy where you could – you build from a template.

Yes, that made sense. That’s what runic magic was, after all, slotting templates together to make whatever you wanted to happen, well, happen. That was what had drawn her to it. So, if you want your demiplane running for a long time, you only spend energy creating the important things – boundaries, walls, whatever you are using to keep a person in. Everything else, you steal.

The more delicate the circuit, the easier it was to fry. If she could push enough energy through it, she’d warp the working just enough for it to fold in on itself. That should, probably, spit the pair of them back out into reality.

Or the formless horrors between the planes would swallow them whole.

She gave Medusa a little more time to brood, letting the thoroughly bad idea finish taking form in her own head, and then whistled to summon her back. Dragging herself from the rising stupor was an ordeal, and she moved slowly on her way back. By the time she was back inside the circle of former mirrors, however, she had seemingly shaken off the worst of it.

‘Got a way out?’ she said. ‘I’m not looking for small talk, just solutions.’

‘Well, seeing as I get the impression you’re not keen on the whole zen-master forgiveness thing—’

‘Correct.’

‘The alternative is an old-fashioned jailbreak. I’ll blast a hole in this bastard thing, and we can stroll right on out.’

A smile crept onto Medusa’s lips. It brought with it some more life to her face. ‘Now that sounds like a real wizard to me.’

Fishing around in her pocket, Millie found a small chunk of chalk and began hurriedly scratching an array of runes down on the stone. ‘You’ll want to take a couple of steps back, but not too many. You still need to be in the blast radius.’

‘Blast radius?’

‘Blast radius,’ Millie said. ‘I’m scribbling out a load of incomprehensible gibberish here, which is going to blow up right in my fucking face. As intended.’

‘And that’s going to break us out of here?’

‘It’s like a jigsaw soaked in nitroglycerin: the pieces don’t fit together and when you start smacking them with a big hammer to try and force the buggers to slot into each other, they go boom.’

Medusa took a single step back, but that was as much as she was willing to concede. She seemingly wanted to stay close enough to loom over Millie as she worked, perhaps learning by observation. For the first time, Millie found herself wondering how someone could live so long and never have picked up any magical skill.

The last rune sketched out, Millie retreated to a safe distance and waited for things to go bad. But they didn’t.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. Scooting a little closer, she waved a hand over the drawings. ‘They’re dead.’

‘What do you mean, dead?’

‘I mean they’re dead,’ she said. ‘There’s no magic in them. You don’t put magic into a rune, they just are magic, or at least are supposed to be. That bitch thought ahead, she didn’t copy the underlying logic for rune magic into this little demiplane.’

‘Then don’t use rune magic, use your arcane talents.’

Millie shook her head. ‘In technical terms, I’m simply not swole enough for that. I’d do myself an injury even trying.’

Slowly, Medusa moved a little closer. She pulled herself taller as well, putting an extra couple of inches between the pair of them, those golden eyes flaring behind the shades once again. ‘Try. I’m not staying trapped in here while she’s out there and vulnerable. Try, or I’ll be the one doing you an injury.’

‘Look, you’re very scary, but threatening me isn’t going to make me miraculously come up with a solution, Lady Snake Tits. Fucking chill.’

Emptying her pockets, Millie started to take stock of her options. There weren’t many that had legs. Most of the random tat she carried with her was useless both magically and otherwise, things that had been intended to end up in a bin or a drawer and just somehow clung to some half-life as pocket trash. What magical accoutrements she did carry were as dead as the runes she had drawn – might as well have had a pocket full of pebbles and dirt for all the good it would do her.

Scooping it all back up, her hands paused on the little deck of cards Laufeyjarson had given her. They were warm to the touch, a gentle thrumming of magic suffusing them. Opening the pack, she slid them out and fanned the deck – every rune was illuminated and powered.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘This shouldn’t—’

‘Not to harsh my mellow or whatever, but ponder it later perhaps? Can you use them to get us out of here?’

Millie didn’t recognise a single one of the runes which made it very likely any spell she worked with the cards would fail extravagantly. Exactly what she wanted. ‘Probably.’

Picking cards at random, she lay them out over the runes she had scribed before, stringing together a set of symbols that were offensively unsuitable. Even without knowing what any of them meant, she could tell the ones that weren’t intended to go together, a weird syntax that just didn’t mesh. With each card slotted into place, she could feel the cascade building, the waves of magic crashing against each other.

She put the last card into place and immediately scooted away. Overshooting, she stumbled and tripped over her own feet, landing sprawled against the wall of the cottage dining room. ‘I thought the transition would be a little more extra.’

Someone cleared their throat from the doorway behind her. Prying her face from the wall, she turned to find a black-haired man leaning on the doorjamb in a transparent attempt to look cool. Annoyingly, it was working.

‘I might be a bit of a rogue, but I’m not going to give you a backdoor with a bumpy landing,’ Laufeyjarson said. ‘If you’re going to do a bit of Deus Ex Machina, there are a few standards to uphold.’

‘What are you doing here, Laufeyjarson?’ Medusa said. She was leaning a forearm on another wall, evidently the transition had not been quite as smooth for her. ‘Come to help, at last?’

He pushed past her, offering a hand to Millie. She took it and he helped her up, smoothing out her jacket and plucking the box of cards from her grip. He clicked his tongue and the cards on the floor leapt up and into the box. ‘I’ll be taking these back. You can do a lot of damage if you know how to use these, and a bright little babe like you will definitely be able to puzzle them out. They’ve served their purpose.’

Medusa spun him around, her face inches from his. ‘Laufeyjarson! Why are you here?’

He blinked. ‘To help, of course. I’ve been working with Old Grey Eyes since the beginning. Us gods have got to stick together, after all.’

Chapter Four

Medusa’s hand closed around Laufeyjarson’s throat, lifting him up onto his tiptoes. ‘Now is not the time for jokes.’

‘It’s always the time for jokes,’ he said. If he found the situation at all distressing, he wasn’t letting it show. ‘Anyway, cool your jets. Don’t go jumping to any conclusions.’

Gritting her teeth, she slowly lowered him down from his tiptoes. ‘You get one chance to explain.’

‘Oh, how gracious,’ he said, shooting a wink at Millie. ‘I haven’t betrayed you, Gorgo old pal.’

‘You’re a double agent?’ Millie said.

‘Of a sort,’ Laufeyjarson said, a cold smirk creeping onto his face. ‘Maybe triple agent? Quadruple? Honestly, I’m not really sure how many backs and forths we’ve got going here. The agendas don’t really match up anyway.’

Medusa hissed. ‘For once in your infuriating life, speak plainly.’

‘Athena needed someone to put your little timeout prison together. She turned to me, expert as I am in, well, basically everything. And, you know, I wasn’t about to leave a god in the lurch, now was I? We’ve got a bond.’

Millie raised her hand. ‘Yeah, but, she’s a god. Can’t she make her own magical prison things?’

‘Ah, you’d think,’ Laufeyjarson said. ‘But the old girl isn’t what she was. Olympus has taken its toll on her, all that seclusion weakened her. She had a need to hit up an old flame. Which you should be thankful for, really. Seeing as I was building the thing, I could leave a little escape hatch in for you.’

‘One that required you to give me a pack of cards at a meeting you had no way of knowing I would attend,’ Millie said. ‘Doesn’t really sound like you planned ahead much there.’

Medusa released her grip. ‘The goddamned coin…’

Laufeyjarson smiled and massaged his neck. The burgeoning bruises wiped away like grease paint. ‘Got it in one. That was me. I was the first person Old Grey Eyes contacted once she got herself spat out of Olympus, and I was honour bound to let the Club know.’

‘You could have just told me,’ Medusa said. ‘Or not helped her at all.’

‘I could have,’ Laufeyjarson said, turning to look at Millie. ‘But I’m loyal to a fault, me. We’ve all got our codes and our habits.’

The bottom fell out of Millie’s stomach. It was happening again. For fuck’s sake. ‘You wanted to meet me.’

‘See, bright as a button, you are. You practice a dying art, babe, and one that I invented. I like to keep an eye on the progress of people like you. After that whole nasty business with those Whitehall losers, I took a special interest in you.’

‘So, you set this all in motion for a face-to-face? Fuck, just send me a text or something. Hit me up on Tinder, I’ve had worse chat up lines.’

‘You people, so married to this boring notion of doing things efficiently. Gorgo needed a heads-up, I wanted a tete-a-tete, and why not organise it so both could be achieved with a bit of fun and frolic? You know, vengeance doesn’t have to be all morose.’

Medusa’s voice was a harsh rasp. ‘See if you think that way when it comes to getting your vengeance.’

Laufeyjarson’s smirk dropped a millimetre. ‘We will. But hey, if you want to keep being a Grumbly Gus I can just leave and not tell you where Old Grey Eyes is hiding out. I mean, if that’s what you want…’

‘You know it isn’t.’

‘Well, perhaps if you say please…’

Millie crossed her arms. The overly confident fuckboy act had worn out its welcome now, but she wasn’t quite sure how best to butt in. What she wanted to do was completely derail the conversation, to drag it away from all this talk of Athena and swing it back around to how Laufeyjarson had gone to some odd lengths to orchestrate a meeting with her.

Another powerful person taking an interest in her out of the blue, albeit this one was a literal god rather than a frustratingly forthright terrorist. If she was to add Jameson Parker to that – and why not, he was public enemy number one now – that made three noteworthy people making the time to insert themselves into her life. That was a pattern, and an uncomfortable one at that. It was Chosen One bullshit, and if it was about to come out that she was the scion of Merlin or some other crusty old ghoul then she was going to lose her shit.

It would almost be preferable to find out that they were all just unbearably horny and into the tramp-punk aesthetic. If only she could believe that.

Medusa and Laufeyjarson’s verbal sparring went back and forth for a while. He was playing up his innocence and artificial naivete, and she leant hard into her frothing vengeance. Eventually, however, the Norseman got his please from the woman, and he all but jumped for joy.

‘I knew you could do it,’ he said. ‘Now, before we set off, are you sure you’re ready for this? Bags packed, guns loaded, suture kits all stowed away safely in your back pocket? It’s a little bit of a trek, and there won’t be much in the way of places to stop along the way.’

‘Just get on with it,’ Medusa said.

‘So impatient. Very well, follow me.’

He led the pair of them outside, closing the front door behind them. Ushering them away from the door, he put a few metres of empty space between them and the building before turning back to face it and unbuttoning his jacket. Setting his feet, he raised his hands up in front of his eyes and started folding his fingers into a flurry of uncomfortable gestures.

Millie watched for a moment before the penny dropped. ‘You’re making rune signs with your hands?’

‘Never thought of that, huh?’ Laufeyjarson laughed. ‘I’ve watched hundreds of runeskalds over the years, and the only ones who ever think to do this only get the idea after I show them. I suppose it is rather tricky.’

‘Human fingers can’t bend that way. We don’t have that many joints.’

‘Nonsense, you can have as many joints as you want if you try. Thing is, no-one ever tries. Especially not these days. Like I said, you’re a dying breed.’

The formula he was hammering out was complicated, a string of runes that slotted together so perfectly that she couldn’t even see the seams. But the more she watched him, the more she saw. At one point, Medusa had tried to interrupt, and Millie had shut her down – he was tracing out locks in the universe, working the metaphysical pins, picking them open a bit at a time. It was a lot to do in the space of twenty seconds, and yet he did it. A masterclass.

The last rune signed, he cracked his knuckles and strode back towards the door. ‘I keep a safehouse here, which I’m about to burn I suppose. Still, probably not a great idea to hold onto a safehouse for too long. And hey, I’ve still got one more surprise for you that you’re going to love.’

He threw open the door and stepped inside, Medusa and Millie rushing after him.

Places on top of other places was starting to get a little old-hat for Millie now, and yet the Norseman had found a way to put a new spin on things. Passing through the door was much more like crossing into Narnia than her previous jaunts – what had been a doorway on one side was a parting in frost-covered brambles on the other. A ring of those same brambles encased them, carving out a clearing large enough for a palatial house carved from a single block of ice. A set of gleaming stairs led up from the garden to the sparkling double doors, several bodies lying at the foot of it.

Stepping to the side, Laufeyjarson gestured towards the house like a used car salesman. ‘Behold, your surprise.’

One of the bodies was sat sprawled on the bottom couple of steps, holding its body upright as its head hung limp to its chest. As they got a little closer, Millie recognised it – Jacquie, her clothes now little more than rips and tears held together by drying blood. With her identified, Millie could now see that the other bodies were arrayed around her, the remains of a victory that hardly seemed worth it to look at now.

Laufeyjarson and Medusa hurried ahead, past the bodies and up the stairs, but Millie hung back. She stepped over each corpse gingerly, trying not to let her eyes linger on the blood that was seeping into the previously bronze ballistic fibre they were each clad in. When she reached Jacquie, she knelt down to inspect her.

Dozens of blade marks, but none especially deep. Each wound was superficial, but the sheer volume must have been what put her down – death by a thousand cuts, perhaps. Or near death, the woman was still breathing.

Rooting around in the bottom of a pocket, Millie found another of the rejuvenating runestones – this one so old and forgotten that it came coated in a thick patina of dust and pocket lint – and cracked it under the woman’s nose. She convulsed as if she had been struck by lightning, her head snapping back and her eyes pulsing in and out of focus erratically, one then the other. Almost as quickly as it started, Jacquie stabilised, her eyes slowly focusing on Millie.

‘That’s good stuff. Got any more?’

‘Didn’t think I had that one, to be honest.’

Jacquie shrugged languidly. ‘It’s good stuff.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Not especially,’ the woman said. ‘But I got them all, right? Ancient order of bodyguards got nothing on me. They were good. Going to be a while before I’m back on my feet, I think.’

‘Let me help.’

‘I like chivalry as much as the next girl, but I’ll be fine. Go help Medusa put the last nail in this thing. That’s why you’re here, right?’

‘I suppose,’ Millie said.

‘Go on, get after her. And tell that slimy Viking bastard he owes me a drink. She does too. For thinning the herd.’

Jacquie smiled and a blood vessel burst in her left eye, flooding the white with blood. With a cough, she slowly dragged herself to the side of the staircase, leaning up against the banister. She settled in, closing her eyes and passing out once again, her breathing shallow but stable.

Millie climbed the stairs and moved into the lobby, a cavernous space with a pair of grand staircases of its own, tapestries, and a sputtering fire pit in the centre. The fire was blue, and the icy walls and floors were various shades of greens and purples, reflecting the incandescent flickering.

Medusa was holding a man’s face to the flame – another of the bronze-clad bodyguards she had seen lying dead outside. He screamed as the fire licked at his face, freezing where it should have been burning. Laufeyjarson was nowhere to be seen.

‘Does she know I’m coming?’ Medusa said, her voice imperious and stony. ‘Is she prepared?’

The only response the man gave was a scream of pain, and with a grunt she released him. He fell back, clawing at his face, frozen skin peeling into his hands and revealing the pink flesh underneath. Clicking her fingers at the bawling man, Medusa grabbed his attention once more and slid her shades down her nose. He managed to gasp out one last breath as he turned to stone.

‘Is Jacquie alive?’ Medusa asked, sliding her shades back into place before turning to Millie.

Millie shivered. ‘Just about. Got more cuts than an Edgar Wright film, though.’

‘Good.’

‘You’re getting awfully dark here,’ Millie said. ‘You sure this is the path you wanted to walk?’

Medusa shrugged, and for a moment Millie thought she saw doubt on the woman’s face. Her gaze lingered a little too long on the petrified man, on the splinters of frozen flesh that were forever trapped under his fingernails now. But any calculations were brushed away. ‘Keep up.’

The woman walked around the remains of the guard and started up the stairs. Millie followed, but kept her distance – no sense in being in the splash zone while Medusa was on the warpath. Despite being carved from ice, the stairs were neither slippery nor cold, though there was a surface level of dampness to the banister. She found her breath started to fog more with each step, and by the time she had reached the top she was puffing out clouds.

Perhaps the guard had told her something useful, or maybe she had some keen intuition, but it seemed that Medusa knew exactly where she needed to go. She thundered down the corridor at the top of the stairs, past chunky, filigreed doors and deeper into the building that Millie would have thought possible from how it had looked outside. After turning a few corners, the chiselled opulence and aristocratic veneer washed away, replaced by blank walls of compacted ice. Whoever it was that had been carving the décor had not made it this far, it seemed.

Finally, Medusa picked a door – a flat slab of purple-green ice – and drove her shoulder into it. There was a crack and a crunch as the seal broke, then a grinding noise and she pushed the slab inward. Inside waited a drably decorated room, lit by low candles and the air thick with a very familiar perfume. It brought Medusa to such a sudden halt that Millie almost crashed into the back of her.

Peering around her, Millie spotted the real reason the woman had stopped. Laufeyjarson was there, kneeling next to a chair woven from sturdy reeds strapped around lusciously varnished wood. His hand rested on the shoulder of the chair’s occupant – an older woman with greying hair, sunken eyes, cheeks that had existed purely to give the bones something to strain against.

The woman squinted. ‘Hello, Medusa.’

‘Athena,’ she said. ‘You’ve looked better. Guilt finally catching up to you?’

The goddess let out a long, ragged, disappointed sigh. ‘No-one ever really changes, do they? As hot-blooded as ever. And this one with you, I assume that’s one of your skalds, Loki?’

She turned to Laufeyjarson, who shrugged and nodded. ‘Still a baby, but I reckon she’s got the skills.’

‘Your word is good enough for me,’ Athena said. With a pained grunt of exertion, she planted her hands on the arms of her chair and pushed herself to her feet. Millie had expected the woman to sway or stagger, but once upright she looked different somehow – almost fortified.

‘You shouldn’t take that one at his word,’ Medusa said, taking a step closer. ‘He gave us a way out of your little trap. Brought us right to you. This Norseman has betrayed you, as you betrayed me.’

‘He did what I expected him to do, Medusa. And what I did should have been expected by you in turn. How else could it have gone?’

‘How else?!’ Medusa roared and lurched forward. Before she could reach Athena, Laufeyjarson stamped his foot, shaking the building.

‘Ladies, as much as I love a good catfight, you’re in my house and I must request we work through the foreplay first,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to fight, at least get said everything that needs to be said.’

Medusa stopped in her tracks and hissed at Laufeyjarson, and somewhere deep in Millie’s brain a penny started to descend. It would take a while to land, but she could feel it tumbling now, ever faster as she started to put the pieces together.

‘What would you have had me do, Medusa?’ Athena said, quietly. ‘You made vows to me, and they were broken.’

‘Not by choice! I would have kept to them until my dying day, but Poseidon—’

Athena’s gaze darkened. ‘His actions were unforgiveable. Reprehensible.’

‘Then why punish me?’

Medusa ripped the scarf from her head, unveiling the snakes once again. This time, the irregular lunges and jerks had been overridden by a focused shiver of rage as each serpent locked its beady eyes on the aged goddess. Some were stoic, others let venom drip down from sharp fangs. The ice hissed wherever the poison landed producing a small puff of steam. If the display bothered Athena, she didn’t show it.

‘Because it had to be someone,’ the goddess said, quietly and slowly. Her voice was cracking. ‘The slight had to be paid for and taking the reparations from my uncle would have been too costly. I couldn’t show weakness.’

‘But I loved you,’ Medusa said. ‘You did this to me, and I loved you.’

Athena took a step forward. With a gentle flexing of her fingers, a spear washed into being in her grip. The shaft was polished metal, and the tip was sleek bronze with an owl carved into it, looking down on the room. ‘If you’ve come here to ask me to undo what I did, I can’t. I cursed you with an eternity to grow and develop, to move beyond what he did, and until that day comes it would be cruel to take that chance from you.’

‘Just stop it.’ Medusa sounded deflated. ‘I get to decide what is best for me, how I deal with my trauma. Not you. You don’t get to dictate how I come out the other side of this, you never have.’

Athena took another step. ‘The hubris of such thinking is writ on my face, it’s true. I know that every decision I have made throughout my life has been the right one, the only option that allowed the gears of the universe to keep turning at any given moment. That does nothing to undo the guilt of making those choices, however. Such is the curse of wisdom.’

‘Well, I’m glad to know you feel bad for turning me into this thing.’

‘I’ve always had remorse over that decision, but I would not change it. To do so would mean conflict with one of the greatest gods of Olympus.’

‘And what is the life and suffering of one insignificant priestess compared to the wrath of a god?’

There was a pause as Athena tightened her grip on the spear. When she spoke again, it was flat and detached, almost as though reciting someone else’s words. ‘Exactly.’

‘Everything that needs saying has been said, Norseman,’ Medusa seethed. ‘Now you’ll get your catfight.’

‘No, there is yet one more thing to say,’ Athena said. She shifted her hold on the spear, taking it in a reverse grip and pointing the shaft towards Medusa. Her strength faltered and she let the shaft drip down towards the floor, shifting her hand up towards the tip.

Medusa’s head traced a path up the spear to Athena’s face. ‘The honour of the first blow? Even now you’d taunt me with this show of bravado?’

‘It’s an apology. A long overdue one.’

‘It’s a spear.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Athena said. Her strength had continued to diminish visibly over the last few moments, though it was all in how she carried herself. Reduced from a confident warrior to a frail old woman in little more than the angle of her head and the set of her brow. ‘I’m giving you the tool of your vengeance.’

‘Nice trick, but your tactics won’t work on me here.’

‘It’s not a trick. There’s no strategy, tactic, plan, not even a scheme. The weight of my decisions pulls at me, and I don’t have it in me to defend them anymore. The damage I have done to those that were devoted to me has eaten into me, turned my insides rotten. What is a god that forsakes those that worship them? It is this husk, this withered sack of pathetic flesh. What right do I have to resist such a righteous cause?’

The spear slipped from her fingers and clattered down to the ice. The metal sang as it juddered to a halt, a golden noise that reverberated off the icy walls and kept Millie locked in place. In fact, no-one seemed keen to move until the final note had faded away. Then, slower than should have been possible, Medusa started to crouch down towards the spear.

Her fingers closed around the shaft.

This felt wrong. She didn’t feel like it was her place to butt in, and yet she couldn’t watch idly by while someone got a bloody great spear shoved through their chest. Could she? Was she that sort of person? She was supposed to be here to help Medusa, but there had to be a better way to interpret help than let her shove a spear into a person.

There had to be.

Medusa lifted the spear from the ground and, for better or worse, Millie moved to act. Or tried to. In her head, she had put herself between the two women, hoping against hope that Medusa wasn’t so poisoned by rage that she wouldn’t stab through the young woman to get at the goddess behind her. A speech was forming in her head too, a moving and profound one about the power of forgiveness, of being able to live in the present rather than the past, some real Hallmark movie shit. If she was lucky, Medusa would have been crying so much she wouldn’t be able to see Athena to stab her.

But none of that happened. The moment Millie tried to move she felt a firm palm on her chest holding her still. Straining against it, she tracked up its arm to find its owner. Laufeyjarson’s face was serious and cold – hips lips thin and straight, brow folded into a scowl of concentration. Unable to push past him, Millie opened her mouth to shout, blinking in disbelief as the words drowned in her throat.

Still moving slowly, Medusa’s hands tightened on the shaft as she lifted it into position, raising the head in line with the goddess’s heart. She took a breath, then another, set her feet, and lunged forward with a silent roar. Millie had time to see the rage twisting her face, the tears trickling down from under her shades, and the eerie calmness of Athena’s face as the spear plunged towards her heart.

‘And scene! Thank you, everyone, that was beautiful. You’ll both be getting some excellent gift baskets, the ones with the mini-muffins and the flowers that last just over a week if you remember to use the plant food provided. I’m looking at you, Sigrun.’

A rush of air filled Millie’s lungs as her reality came crashing down again. Medusa stopped in her tracks, lifting up the spear in time to avoid stabbing the goddess, who herself was already calmly stepping to the side. Then, Medusa shook the goddess’s hand and turned back to Laufeyjarson.

‘We good?’ she said.

‘Better than good,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a call for the next show, whenever that ends up being.’

The woman nodded and left the room, leaving behind Laufeyjarson and an extremely confused Millie. The Norseman took Athena’s spot in the chair and lent forward, elbows on his knees, watching the young woman’s brain twist itself in knots trying to understand what the hell it had just seen. It failed.

‘What in the blue fuck is going on?’ she managed to ask.

Laufeyjarson nodded gently. ‘Yes, that’s the reaction I expected. Actually, a bit less swearing than I thought there’d be.’

‘Well, excuse me. Let me try again. What in the ever-fucking piss-curdling brain-buggering hell is going on?’

‘Better,’ he said. ‘Let me introduce myself properly by way of an explanation: Loki Laufeyjarson, god of lies, primordial trickster, and patron of runeskalds. Think it through. You’ll get there.’

The penny that had been set in motion inside Millie’s brain finally hit the ground. ‘If you’re about to tell me this was all a dream, I swear to god I am going to shove a nail file down your urethra.’

‘Don’t threaten me with a good time,’ he said, again with that slimy wink. ‘But nothing as pedestrian as that. Think of this more as one of those travelling production that come and give assemblies at schools. Remember those? Well, like that, but with better production values and a much more useful moral than peer pressure is uncool, kids.’

‘I’m not seeing the moral here.’

Laufeyjarson sighed. ‘Then let me spell it out for you. Hello, I’m a god and I have plans for you. Savvy?’

Chapter Five

Millie’s head was spinning. The existential nightmare of trying to determine what had been real and what had been some weird play staged by a Norse god was difficult to navigate – she could feel her memories shifting as they were recontextualised so suddenly, and it brought her headache crashing back. With a grunt she started to rub at her temples, trying in vain to make some sense of things.

Laufeyjarson hopped to his feet and started pacing.

‘Okay, so here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I’m guessing your head is swimming right now, lot of confusion and disbelief. I’m going to do my best to put on my serious face here and explain things in a way that I hope will clear it all up for you.’

‘That would be nice.’

He smiled at her. It had lost any charm it once held. ‘Everyone you’ve interacted with – other than me, naturally – was an actor. A Valkyrie or an Einherjar, to be specific. I’ve got a lot of pull with that lot, and they love a bit of drama. Heard that Wagner piece? Epic, right? Anyway, point being, they were reading from a script I gave them.’

Millie frowned; the headache was getting worse. ‘Yeah, you’ve been clear on that bit. That much I get. What I’m not getting is why. Like, I get you are the god of being a dick, but why focus on me?’

‘I was really hoping you’d work that out on your own, but I suppose it is a lot to ask when you’ve had the rug pulled out from under your day. But, short answer, you’re getting noticed. In the space of a couple of weeks you’ve gone from barely registering as a blip on the radar to being this huge splotch all over the screen.’

‘That’s not my doing,’ Millie said. ‘And even if it was, I don’t need another very fucking important magical git trying to foist themselves on my life. I don’t need a mentor, and I’m not looking for one.’

‘Other than Kaitlyn van Ives?’ Laufeyjarson wiggled his eyebrows as he said her name. ‘Or that obnoxious dick, Jameson Parker?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It doesn’t matter, I’m not trying to get all sexy magical sugar daddy on you. I’m not mentor material, ask my kids. But the fact of the matter is that there are, at present, only two runeskalds in the entire world. Proper ones, I mean, ones that embrace the art for what it is, what it could be. I want you to be the third.’

‘I don’t know if you noticed, mate, but I’m already a pretty decent runeskald. I might not be top tier but—’

Laufeyjarson’s laugh interrupted her. It was sharp and swift, a rapier of a giggle. ‘Far from top tier, babe. Right now, you’re working with only half the tools in the box – using a hammer to beat the screws into the wood. This performance was to help you realise that.’

A whole host of questions took form in Millie’s mind, but she knew the response that awaited most of them. This was not a conversation, not really – Laufeyjarson was giving a lecture and he only really wanted her input to show she was listening. If she was going to interrupt him – and she was damn sure going to do just that – it was going to be with a good question.

‘You’re making great progress with the runes, I won’t deny that,’ he continued. ‘But you’re stagnating. You’ve got no poetry, no skald. Do you even understand how this all works?’

‘I’ve got a pretty solid working idea, yeah.’

‘Indulge me.’

‘Suck my arse.’

‘Oh, now that’s not fair,’ Laufeyjarson wagged a finger at her. ‘I’m trying to be serious and adult here. You can’t go throwing an insult like that at me when you know I’m trying not to let the witty playboy out. But okay, I’ll go ahead and tell you anyway. You know what this is, right?’

He raised a hand and twisted his fingers as she had seen him do earlier, forming a perfect rune. The air sizzled slightly as the sigil pulsated a gentle red glow. Millie crossed her arms and sighed. ‘Kenaz, the rune for fire and a load of other things. Basic shit.’

‘Right, but how do you know that?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘How do you know that Kenaz is the rune for fire, for torches, for hearths, for learning? How did this little squiggle take on so much meaning? Now, this one…’

Again, his fingers twisted and bent, the gentle red glow changing into a sombre black sheen across the skin. Millie started to tap her foot impatiently. ‘Yz, the death rune.’

‘And war, ending, stuff like that. But again, how do you know this? How did they come to mean these things? The answer is that those meanings were assigned to them. Now, try this one.’

This time, bending his fingers into shape seemed more difficult for Laufeyjarson. He still made it look easy, but it was a slower motion, less practiced. There was a small tremor in his hand as he finished the form, the black sheen giving way to a faint texture of cracked stone. This was not a rune Millie recognised.

‘No?’ he said, reading her expression. ‘This is the rune for treachery, betrayal, heartbreak, a whole host of things really. It’s pretty new.’

‘New? There are no new runes.’

Laufeyjarson clapped his hands and pointed at her triumphantly. ‘Exactly. Stagnation! To each rune is assigned a meaning, a story, that defines its purpose. You wield those stories pretty well, I guess, but you’re still just clicking building blocks together. Babe, you’re basically doing the equivalent of magical fanfiction. You’re the E.L James of runeskalds.’

‘What’s wrong with fanfiction?’

‘Nothing,’ Laufeyjarson said. ‘Provided you learn, you improve. It’s a great entry point, but if you want to be taken seriously, you find your voice. Write your own stories.’

‘So that whole play was, what, the story of this rune?’

‘In a sense, yes,’ Laufeyjarson said. ‘The core principles anyway. You went off script a little – you really fucked up reaching out to The Nameless One like that but talking your way out of it was edge-of-my-seat entertainment, let me tell you. The bulk of the events went ahead as written, though. The difference was that they didn’t happen to you originally.’

‘But they did happen?’

Laufeyjarson’s energy dipped a little, a glimmer of deep thought passing over his face. ‘They did, to a runeskald by the name of Wolfgang. You’ll meet him one day if things go according to plan.’

‘So, this is a recruitment speech. Another one. Another fucking powerful arsehole trying to fold me into his pool of assets,’ Millie said, grinding her teeth. ‘You nearly had me there.’

Again, the happy-go-lucky veneer cracked on the Norseman’s face. ‘It’s a warning. And not a threat either. It’s me telling you that gods can die, can be killed even. It’s me letting you know that those out there with a mind to do just that might go seeking out the people that those gods have a connection to.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ Millie said. ‘There’s nothing here connecting us.’

‘You use the magic I created. That’s enough.’

‘And that puts me on the shit lists of all your enemies? I never agreed to that!’

‘Maybe I’m being dramatic,’ he said. ‘Maybe this is just one big mid-life crisis or something, the handsome god popping down to earth for a chat with a hand-picked prophet. Or maybe I just recognise someone who is in over her head, but she doesn’t even know she’s in the water. If that were the case, wouldn’t she deserve to know that she at least needs to start swimming?’

‘But I haven’t done anything.’

Laufeyjarson blinked. ‘Haven’t you? You helped destroy the Vault, you’ve been ushering ghosts across the veil for years. Yes, you’ve been hiding yourself away for whatever reason, but people are taking notice and they’re going to start pushing. That’s a fact, no-one with magic – of any stripe – gets to sit on the side lines forever. You’re going to get dragged into schemes. A lot of potential stories are going to swallow you up, there’s no fighting that. Might as well make the most of them.’

‘By harnessing them… Creating new runes and spells?’

‘By whole-arseing this runeskald thing and making sure you have the tools to survive. Think of how many beautiful concertos and symphonies can be composed with those 88 keys on a piano, then think of how much more you could do if you could pluck completely new keys out of thin air. You could be a Beethoven.’

‘Or an E.L James.’

‘Crossing the metaphors there, but sure. Anyway, I’ve said my piece, done the needful, all of that. Conscience cleared, and that’s a whole weight lifted. See ya.’

He fired a quick and limp wave in her direction and made to walk past her. Millie grabbed at his coat, spinning him around. ‘That’s it?! You essentially kidnap me for a day and dump all that shit on me, unasked for, and now you’re just going to piss off into the sunset?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Yeah, nah, I don’t think so. I’ve got more questions.’

Laufeyjarson pulled his arm free. ‘Then go out and find the answers, babe. You’ve got the rune part sorted, go do a bit of the old skald-duggery.’

He made a flash of runic gestures with his fingers and disappeared in a comical puff of smoke, no doubt worked into the spell entirely for the dramatic benefit. It hadn’t really added to the effect.

Millie let herself fall into the chair and allowed her head to sink to her knees.

It was never going to end, was it? Laufeyjarson has been right about one thing: things had been escalating quickly in her life lately. All the people coming out of the woodwork, dragging her into things that she, by rights, had no business being involved in. But then, maybe that was just a reality of her life. She’d managed to put this all on hold for a while, laying low in the spooky cracks of London town, but there had always been that one ghost hanging over her, that one nagging feeling that, one day, she’d have to grow up.

The words made her want to vomit. Grow up, as if she hadn’t done enough of that already.

Laufeyjarson could never know that he had touched a nerve with his little game, he didn’t deserve the satisfaction. But the more she thought about it, the more she found herself conceding to his point. Helping Parker and his crew destroy the Vault, studying the weird runic device, pushing herself to help Kaitlyn van Ives, all of these things had made her feel awake. It made her life beforehand, the time spent fending for herself after losing Wingard, seem like a fugue, like it happened to someone else.

It was time to accept that, for good or ill, adventure was going to find its way to her one way or another. She could fight that for sure, try and duck away back into the shadows and ride it out until the world grew boring and monotonous and safe again. Or she could let herself try and embrace it.

Could she accept being a bit-part side character in the story of her world forever?

Fuck that noise. If the stories and tales and whatever else runeskalds were supposed to use to craft new magic was going to come for her then this was the last time it would find her passive.

She was going to be the fucking protagonist.

Thanks For Reading

I hope you enjoyed the book (if you made it this far then I’m going to assume you at least didn’t hate it), and I’m very thankful for you taking the time to read through Millie Thatcher’s second little adventure. She’s got big things coming!

If you enjoyed it, or even if you didn’t, please consider writing a little review. Writers can’t grow without feedback, and pretty much every comment received will give me something to work on in the future. This is especially useful for series like this one; I want to make sure I’m giving you what you want to read, after all!

So, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads if you want, and if you’re interested in keeping up to date with what I’m doing and future releases you can find me at @stevetheblack on twitter or even sign up to my newsletter from my website at stevekpeacock.com!

The WARLOCKS OF WHITEHALL series

Lore and Order

Hair of the Dog

Red Peace

Dead Tired

Rob The Casbah

Other books by Steve K Peacock

Diplomancer

Cold Dawn

Ghosts on the Wind

Winter’s Wake