3. Paint It Black

. . .

"So, I got the skinny on why Stephen Tepper dropped his legal practice in the eighties."

Loki put the hot cup of coffee down on the bench next to him, glancing up and down the sidewalk as desiccated leaves skittered along his shoes. "And? Does it relate?"

"Might. Llewelyn Jones was a for-profit children's rehab at the end, right? Well, I got a whole lotta opinions about that sort of thing that I won't get into right now? But let's cut it down to bone and say that sooner or later, someone tries to wet their beaks the wrong way. Did you ever come across the big story in Pennsylvania in 2008?"

"Daisy, look at me properly sometime and try to remember what I am. If it isn't supernatural, doesn't explode, isn't at all entertaining, or not directly necessary information related to my work, I truly, genuinely, could not, in any way, shape, or form, care less. I've tried to care less about earthly minutiae, see if there was some further bottom, but it would require putting myself in a coma. I called it good, my depths of uncaring. I'm satisfied with my apathy. It leaves me enough mental room for everything else I do need. What happened in 2008, since now must I apparently care?" He picked his coffee back up for a long sip, glancing at a fluffy white cloud draped low in the sky.

"Kids for cash scandal. Big, big deal in the state. Judge was taking kickbacks from the builder of two private facilities, directly profiting them both by putting kids in a jam regardless of what they actually did to get locked up. And everybody clutched their pearls in the news, like this was an absolutely horrible thing that could totally never normally happen. Never happened before, won't happen again. Total, awful one off. My god, let's think of the children."

"You know, I do think I'm getting a distinct taste of the shape and size of your opinions. So, let me take an enormous leap of logic and say that you've found that not only is the current Tepper still the dominant landowner, but he got a bit more legally involved with matters a couple decades ago and made a little extra cash for the bank to boot."

"Technically the charges went unproven, like everything else that went down in that place before it got shuttered. But he hung it up and withdrew to his super nice gated property. Keeps private otherwise, before and since. Hope that tickled your nerd brain a bit. So, whatcha in town for today?"

"Nothing. A little fresh air, a cooked meal. I've got what I need at the facility already."

"Usually there's a mass grave by this point if the place is as junky as it sounds like. I was going to guess you're renting a backhoe for some digging to find out. Maybe drop on me you found something on the scanner you took out of our stash."

He smiled, the sort of grim and brutal smile used by the animal kingdom as a warning and not a pleasantry. "Oh, I'm fairly certain there is one. But if you'll recall the property's original intended use, it won't be an easy matter to unearth it. The scanner's useless here. There's a half-collapsed and abandoned mining network running underneath the whole property. Regular sinkhole bait, to be plain. I give it another decade or two if left untouched before the whole thing begins to crumble in on itself. I've seen the geological surveys and marked the changes over years. Wasn't the fire that speeds up the coming demolition, it's the tunnels. A rash of microquakes hasn't helped matters."

"Oh my god, you think they dumped kids in the holes. Like, do you have proof they actually did get rid of them? Like the rumors say?"

"I don't, Daisy. I think part of the core problem is that no one has ever allowed proof to survive, nothing more than the rare rumor of digging into the night. Digging for access, digging through to their own graves. They had a careful, vested interest in that caution. I can't find anything tangible in the ruins. Everything's just missing paperwork and the dismissive attitude that sells the story of children running away after wars and socioeconomic upheavals." He shifted on the bench, draping his arm along the back of it. "I've got one avenue to see if I can at least find out what happened for knowledge's sake, but it's simply not a matter that's going to be put to rest in the public eye. I'll know, and you and Coulson will know, and it will be, regrettably, all I can do from that perspective."

"There anything you can do from other perspectives? I mean, considering ethics and whatnot, which sometimes you kinda don't."

"Perhaps. Just perhaps."

. . .

It was a playroom meant for the younger children, a square grey brick of a room now sad and tattered, with filthy foam cubes once colored brightly jammed into corners. Young enough for such simple toys? Loki frowned as he examined the detritus, even he nettled somewhat by the implication of the unwanted youths. Stacking rings. Torn books for the earliest readers. All thrown away now. He looked up at the ceiling, the way the paint bubbled and warped from the fire.

There was the shape of the riddle, told him the first thing he needed to know. The fire had started here somehow, but done the least amount of damage. Windowsills were scorched black, and the ceiling, and the door to the rest of the wing was cooked out of shape and splintery. But the contents were mostly unscathed. The floor itself utterly untouched. The boy couldn't free himself. This was his desperate attempt, now too alone with all the others gone and the place shuttered.

The hall beyond had seen the inferno, and he'd stepped carefully along support frames cooked dangerously close to ash, using magic to lighten his way across.

"There weren't many of the really young ones." The boy was on the other side of the room's threshold. He wouldn't come in.

"Not much consolation, I suppose." His nostrils tingled again, as if teased by dust. Not dust, he knew. Magic. Half-tamed magic. He bent down and tugged at the forgotten square of throw carpet. No, it hadn't been cut underneath. He lifted his head and scanned the room. There. East side. They'd rolled the entirety of the cheap flooring back to the baseboard before starting. He could feel the remnants of something on the border between real and ethereal. Yes. He was right. This was the boy's tethered locus. Whatever had happened years ago, it had happened here.

Loki stood up, taking two long steps to the edge of the room, kneeling down again to wrap his fingers around the fraying edge of the floor.

"Please don't."

"It's going to be all right. That's my promise. But I need to see what was done," he said, carefully and easily pulling away the flooring to reveal the untreated wood underneath. Things shifted and moved along the floor out of the way of his inhuman strength.

There. The power that teased at his senses pulsed as he studied the haphazard lines in the wood and the dark stain in the center of it all. A poor job, but he could feel in every etched rune that the lost carver had done the best they could. "We come to the next step of our bargain. Tell me the story. Tell me what it was here, and tell me how you died."

"It hurts." The boy's haunt of air rattled in the dead, dry throat, but no wind rose to defend him.

"Not for much longer. This is the first part of ritual." He looked up to spy the sliver of the white face by the door. "Do you know that, what I'm trying to do? It's a very old way of touching power, primal, open to priests and storytellers both. The Rite of the First Time Telling. By the internal logic of it, all times a tale is told is the first time, with the same power and intent layering into a weave like a book spanning time itself. This is how kings and other avatars sometimes tried to claim a God's power, by telling and living their tale so truly that they wrapped themselves in it like a mask. Incarnation, a kind of mystery play where the actors become the divine. So by telling your tale to me, we'll be living it one more time. But I can give it an ending it didn't have before. Do you understand?"

The clammy brow nodded, though Loki knew that wasn't quite true for the boy. He'd died too young for a deep mage's esoterica. But the gist was simplistic enough. All children understood the rules and potential imaginative power of story. He smiled, as best he could as the pulse of power continued to thrum through the untouched floor. "Tell me now. Let's be done."

. . .

The Lost Boy: Whistle, Lad, and Never Will You Go Home

There were ghost stories handed down every decade, from the big kids to the little kids, long, wild tales of children trapped in the old halls and the new left behind to torment their tormentors. In the dark after lights out, the ghosts were familiar and comforting and, as every child stuck there knew, not real.

Nobody stopped what was going on. If they fought back, they got hurt. If they laid there and took what was to come, they got hurt. If they screamed, they went out to the back fields to dig and dig and sometimes that's when they didn't come back.

The worst was that it didn't happen all the time. For long months it was okay, even almost safe, as they lined up for coursework that changed with state requirements every few years and took their heavy books back to their spic and span dorms to study in cautious, careful silence. Sometimes a child would even leave to go home and small pockets of lingering resistance would cheer the free bird on his way out the door, hopefully to never come back. They didn't want visitors. Best to run, to stay loose and well far away.

Because sooner or later something would change in the air, and the guards would be different, with bland faces and flat emotions, and they'd know the reprieve was over. It was the culling season. Hellfire season, and sooner or later someone was going to get pulled downstairs, all the way downstairs to the room they dressed up for visitors as a record room, and what was left was going to be put in the holes. The rest would be harried and hurt, until the snows came with their mercy. They knew that story.

There was a man dressed in black that would come at midnight at the last edge of summer, same day every year, and the adults would all go to the far corner of the academy. The dare among the bravest was to huddle at the windows despite the guards and look at the flash of candle and torchfire at the stone monument back there that none of them liked to go near. After all, it was his fault, all of this. The Teppers, the human tommyknockers of the dead mines below. It was the living family that really haunted the academy, and everything that started in that long, hot night every year was for their purpose.

They'd take a boy that was sleeping, and they'd put him in the holes, screaming, screaming to look for the old man Tepper to serve him. That was the rule, the thing nobody wrote down in the will. Because the club told Tepper so; told him the way to immortality was through the young. And if it worked for Tepper, it might work for anyone. So Tepper's descendants played along and fed the tomb and the mines and nobody tried to stop it. Tepper men still died, but the rite went on.

Of course, the children weren't told all this. They put it together over decades. Each generation stole scraps of knowledge from things overheard in the halls. Whispers between guards and officials as the summer grew hot. The sneakiest of them got into the record halls and stole the hidden books, black books bound with leather and that smelled like dead lizards flash-cooked by hell itself. Oily stuff had been rubbed into their covers and some poor kid drew the short straw to handle it, sniffing at his fingertips for days and losing his appetite. The books told them the most, what the Teppers were trying to do, how to do it. The sacrifices. And they told other things beside, about magic.

It was the sixties kids that first tried to piece a defense together against the black arts of those blackest summer nights. They'd read about the kids that tried to get away and thought if they could invoke their spirits, those willful enough to try, they might come and defend the living. So they carved runes into toys and hid them around the building, they prayed and they clapped and they looked for names.

And at the border between summer's end and autumn's chill, the man in black came and they died anyway.

The seventies were hopeless years, huddling in metal beds in the brand new wing built to house the prey. But they still stole the books and spread the stories. Maybe someone else would have a better idea. Maybe someone would have an idea to make it stop.

. . .

His name was William and he had a plan. He put it together over months, gritting his teeth and working over all the stolen notes and copied books. He went to work the very next morning after the guard and the man in black had stood right by his bed and taken the new kid sleeping in the bunk above. So new William hadn't even gotten his name. He'd laid awake while it happened, shivering with his frozen hand stuck fast to his mouth, too cowardly to shout out anything in protest and in the morning the bunk was still empty. There was only the smell of fear, but no ghost came back for him to apologize to.

They put another new boy in the bed a week later, an asthmatic little runt who would have been picked on by the hierarchy of the survivors, if tall, wide-eyed William hadn't immediately clung to him in a kind of living confessional.

The new boy heard it all and took it in alright, whooping for air and gasping and hugging him anyway. They were best friends. They knew everything, and by the time summer reached its next crescendo, they would have died for each other.

So William sweated and ate his mind half to death and confessed his sins to the new boy as the year went on, and nervously, feeling all the acid in his stomach roil and turn bitterly against him, he called as many kids together as he could dare into the barely used playroom shortly before midnight. It was still the 'good' season, so the guards let them mostly do what they like. They knew better than to misbehave anyway. So he stood and with his shaking, wavering voice said, "I think we can defend ourselves."

"They tried like over a decade ago, man." One of the bigger kids shoved black knuckles into the pockets of his cotton pants. "They gave it their best shot. What you think you got?"

"They didn't want to take the risk, no way could they consider going all the way with what the books told them. Because it's gotta be strong enough to match the Tepper Curse. And that's dangerous stuff. That's the darkest of magic, even if you're doing it for good. The books say that, over and over. That you gotta commit, and know the risks."

A stillness came over the playroom as kids shifted and looked at each other. On some level, instinctual, they began to see what he was getting at.

"We have to make our own defender. We gotta lift someone up, make 'em powerful enough to hit back." William inhaled, still shuddery. "But that costs. I mean, they're going to be bound here. Bound by death and life and the need to try and do their best to look out for us. Maybe even hunt down the evil thing and choke it out, right? So they gotta be stronger than they ever could be alive."

"Oh my God, William." A hand shook as a mouth was covered. The boy who spoke sounded nauseous.

"I've got it all. I've got the runes and the circle." William wrung his fingers together. "I put it all together, sketched it out so many times I could do it in my sleep. We can do it right in here."

"No way, dude. No way you're getting a volunteer." Voices muttered in agreement. Too much, they said. No way. Not them. Not at that price.

William put his hands out, trying to get them back. "I'm not asking for one! I'll do it! I'll show you everything, and you do it to me." Because he couldn't save the boy in the bunk above. Because he dreamed about it, over and over and over.

The littlest boy, the runt with the inhaler, his friend, piped up in his reedy voice. "But you know how to do it. What if we screw it up? We'll lose you, Willy. You'll just be gone if we screw up."

"You won't. You just gotta do EXACTLY what I tell you." He patted at his thin chest under the stripy cotton shirt. "And the-the hard part isn't that hard. We're small. I looked it all up, found out how I won't bleed everywhere and then you just put my body in one of the holes. It's gross and scary, but it'll be easy and I'll be okay after. Even if it something goes wrong, at least I'm out, right?"

"But we could screw it up and we'll lose you or maybe something worse could happen! You know it all," said his friend, desperate to get him to see. The little boy stepped forward, grabbing at him with tiny fingers. Between them was every hour they'd been friends, between them was that raw sincerity. William had no choice but to heed. "I volunteer."

The room went deadly still. The raspy, reedy voice that never had enough air to carry it was suddenly strong.

"Do me. You know how, and it's stronger if it's willing, right? And I'm sick, I'm sick ALL the time. I'm a load, Willy. I want to. I want out." He reached forward again and hugged the bigger boy. "I forgive you already. For all of it. I want to save us. No more dead kids."

. . .

They did it at midnight the week before the man in black came. They did it in the playroom, with the stolen candles and the bundle of sheets laid as carefully as they could in the middle of the pre-carved circle. William did the rest, and he kissed his friend on the forehead, and it was quick. They had to take the knife away from him after, the other boys. Or they were going to lose two.

The wind screamed from midnight to dawn. It howled, it snarled in the chimney and it slammed all the windows shut. Guards ran down the halls, slapping on lights with their big adult faces slack with fear. That's how the children knew it was done. The ghost was real at last.

But it didn't save them.

It didn't save a single one.

The man in black still came that year, and the next year, and the wind screamed its offense and tried to blow out their candles. They relit them and moved on. The shadows of the dead crawled across the sea of grass to lick at their heels and shame them for what they did, but no one noticed. Stephen Tepper never looked down at the thing he helped make. There was only the dark.

The little dead boy never found out what happened to William. William was gone, either dead or into the world. The dead boy was alone, and no one could hear him whisper in his reedy voice. All they heard was his mindless screams on the wind.

. . .

The little dead boy was hunkered on his rump, framed in the playroom door. It was the first time Loki had seen him full, the broken waxy face and the stains of blood along the thin, too thin chest still heaving shallowly within the sleeping shirt he'd died in. "I couldn't save anyone."

Loki sat down by the edge of the circle, examining the trapped spirit plainly and with no small amount of real sympathy. "Tepper today has no magic, and no eye to see what is unseen. Not him, not his predecessors, not a single one amongst his shoddy little pretender's club, I think. Under his monument, there is only bone and scraps of long dead meat. I've looked with my better eye and there's nothing there to see. There was also nothing for you to stop, nothing within your chained realm to touch, save to give what fear you could. Your friends had the force of need and belief to empower you. The Teppers had only avarice, and that's not enough to make a ritual real. What the children needed was for the living to step up and save you, and the living never did. That was the failure, a tale repeated enough across more than one world to know its own truth. The living oft forget to be kind."

The air filled with the thin, rolling sob. "Is that true?"

"It's true, little boy. It's true because I know these things far, far better than he or your intrepid friend William ever could. I do not boast. This is my domain, and I maintain it jealously. You did your best, and here, trapped in this place, you've been their eternal memory. That's not nothing, boy. That's a story, and you just gave it to me. Freely, though I admit some cajoling on my part. And you're owed one more in turn. But first, I need to start a little work."

"What are you going to do?"

"Your William had it mostly right, but there's things to fix and change. And at the end of the changes, it'll set you free. The fire you set off here was a good attempt, but you can't burn out your own tether. Now, then. Pending one more scrap of duty on your part. One more thing to set it all right." Loki pulled a small packet of white silk from his pocket, his fingers feeling the edge of the knife inside. "Not because I'm kind, you must note. But because it is proper."

. . .

The Little Prince: A Fine Knife to Cut Away the Dark

Sweet, still fat-faced young Thor flung his arm around his tinier brother as he plopped down beside, the other prince looking dirtily up at him from a book of old and likely useless magic their mother granted him just the night before. Still and all he was obsessed with it, the old made new again. Thor's voice was pitched comically low, a hiss for his brother's ears only, but loud enough to guarantee to any listener they were up to no good. "Are we sneaking into the forest tonight? We can't do it much longer, not until the seasons spin 'round again and the moons shift anew."

"You think our enemies need another routing?" Loki shut the book in his hands with a grudging sigh. Only a little grudging, for the forest had its own prizes at night to be stolen.

"I do, little brother. Verily, I do very much indeed." Thor grinned, broad and white-toothed. "I would have one more word with my enemies this gloomy eve, before they are permitted their wild hunt untouched along our bleak skies."

Loki rolled his eyes at Thor's florid and absolutely atrocious grammar. Gods help us all, the day the golden prince might choose to write his own speeches to a kingdom knelt before his elder knee. Already young Loki believed he had more taste than the coarser boy prince, and that he would do what he could to fix those someday speeches before they were set upon the ears of an unwary populace. But he loved the brutish and good-natured Thor all the same.

This was the game: Two princes at the edge of a forest rich and green and pleasant at day, black and haunting in the shadows of the strange long night where no moons hung in the controlled sky. A vast forest they weren't allowed in at the best of hours, and so the taboo made it the perfect place to play when they were too energized by their own youthful minds to sleep. They'd slip the guards, and Thor with his first weapons and Loki with his first spellbooks would go to the trees and come up with all the ways they'd protect great golden Asgard when the chains of Hel snapped free and set loose the unknowable upon everything they loved.

There were always more battles to fight, although they took care to not go too far into the woods. Whatever else might lurk there, Mother's ire was a greater fire to be wary of. On this, they were united. Only the fringe, and nothing more, with an eye to castle spires to ensure their own safety.

Loki considered it all, then smiled, already fangy and visibly wily along his pale features at this young age. "Then I've got some new spells in mind. Good ones. They'll frighten off anything that gets too close, and if that's not enough, I've got a summons I could try."

Thor laughed down at him. "You pretend to be a little too fearless in the dark, brother. You've got to learn a taste of caution and not try to prove so much. It's not even like you go in there properly armed. I'm the one with a sword, you know." Oh, Thor was so proud of his first steel sword, granted him on his just passed twelfth nameday. Another would not be his until he proved worthy of it, so it did not matter that his treasure was soft-edged and prettier than it was useful. He loved it utterly.

"Swords don't do enough against the legions of the dead and damned," said Loki haughtily, nettled that Thor called out his childish fears. He did not fear death, he thought, but he did fear the deepest dark of the woods, where the wind screamed coldly. Sometimes he had nightmares about that cold; sweaty, horrible things that jerked him upright with a scream strangling in his youthful throat. "You need magic for that, fire and ice both. You need me alongside, and if anything, I'M to be the stronger when all Hel breaks loose."

Thor poked gently at the book in his brother's hands, knowing too hard a prod would get him a smack from a protective hand. "Spells from these books, then? The dust alone will choke our enemies where they stand." He got a smack anyway, for his droll tone and the mocking it carried. "You should bring your toy, too, to protect yourself further. The baby knife."

"It's an athame, you dolt." Loki bopped Thor on the head with the heavy tome, an act born out of sheer frustration. A gentle enough bop, but some real heat was behind it. "It's special. It's not a ruddy toy."

"It looks like a toy," said Thor, his brows knit together in doubt.

"Well, it's my first. Like your sword. And just like your sword, that means I will treat it properly. It's only used for ritual work and purification, and it's supposed to be kept clean, both physically and spiritually. That does not mean I drag it around the ruddy woods at night to pick twigs out of my ruddy boot!"

Thor flung his hands up in surrender. His brother was afire, better to let the matter ease. "My blade, then, and your books. And may all the darkling critters flee as we approach!"

Loki nodded once, quickly mollified by the prospect of secret war against unceasing evil. As a truce, he offered a hug slung tight around his brother's waist. "Tonight. When the guards change shift."

. . .

The spell was still difficult for his hands to shape, and Loki was trying to be cautious and small about it. That made it trickier yet. The tiniest magelight to show their way down the overgrown path into the trees, a flickering pinpoint gleam of blue-white light that he let drop by their feet as they walked, to show up any roots that might trip their still-thin ankles. It followed along, dancing and bouncing along the crumbly earth and atop fallen needles and leaves. "Only that and no more, lest we warn the enemy of our approach."

"Or get caught by Mother. Or even worse, Father." Thor shuddered under his woodland grey cloak, tugged close for warmth. The act rattled the soft steel sword in its wooden scabbard, and he put his hand on it to still the noise.

"Fair point," Loki whispered back. "Mother will be fury alight but that storm settles in time. Father will killus." He looked down to keep his mind and his guidance on the light, letting Thor take the lead into the deeper woods. "So what shall we hunt? Are Hela's minions led by the allied frostwolf charge tonight? Or does Surtr himself prepare the burning deep in the heart of the forest, setting the dark elves out to scuttle in the shadows to feed on us?"

"The frostwolves keep to the thinner woodlands to the east and especially amongst the small caves. Safer there, for them and us."

"Well, yes. That's where they were last year." Loki rolled his eyes. He'd established that, done the scouting himself among the shallower dips into Asgard's flat earth only to find scuffled dirt that absolutely, in the heat of his youthful imagination, could have been made by broad and hairy wolfen feet. Frost giants and their half-tamed beasts. He shivered, and not at all in pretend. "Migration is a thing, you know."

"Hela is cleverer than that. She might stick to the shadows, and trick us with the things we believe in." Thor turned and looked soberly at his brother, an expression oddly adult on the round face. "She might try to put us against each other. I'll see a shade and think it's you, and never realize it's a piece of her come to hurt me."

Loki laughed in disbelief so raw it almost hurt. "That'll not happen, you know I'd never! Let her try, it'll be her final downfall!"

Thor hugged him, full of trust. The scabbard on his back rattled again, and he pulled away to silence it once more. "Hush. Do you hear that?"

Loki did not, and knew his ears were better, but he stilled anyway to see if Thor knew what he sensed.

Thor plunged ahead into the forest, almost at the edge of what the little light could do for them. That caught the air in Loki's throat and he sped up, not wanting to be left alone in the dark in his brother's wake. "What is it? What, what?"

Thor pulled him into the lee of a tall, shadowing tree, peeking around its broad trunk. "Feral bilgesnipes, in service of an evil witch. I hear them slaver."

Loki tried to not groan aloud. Them, again. Only them. More concerning was that for Thor, half the time it came down to evil witches and bitter trickeries. Too simplistic a war fantasy for his taste, and besides, Loki had some sympathies there already. He settled for rolling his eyes instead, then paused as something in the distance caught his eye. He craned his head around instead for a better look, his eyes blinking rapidly as wondered what it was he thought he saw.

The soft green light in the depths of the woods flickered back as if acknowledging his gaze. Unaware he was doing it, his small fine hand tightened on Thor's arm. "Scared of bilgesnipes tonight?" laughed his brother. Then he craned his head back around, still listening.

A shimmer of unwanted comprehension crawled along the flesh of his arms, raising all the fine little hairs. He doesn't see it, Loki thought. It's real, and he doesn't see.He took a hesitant step forward away from the tree trunk, forward towards the sickly green light. His eyes narrowed, trying to find a shape in the distant gleam as curiosity battled with the growing fright in his belly. He didn't hear Thor hiss at him, wondering what he was doing. He was going to give their position away to the enemy. He took another step, now utterly focused on the thing. He swallowed his fear down, he thought, thinking so fast it blocked everything else out. There was almost a sound, a frequency, something lower than his ears could catch. A thrum, a drumbeat that tried to match his heart and gripped at the deep part of the brain where fear lived.

Thor's stronger arm grabbing him around the waist and hauling him back made him screech in startled outright terror. "What's got into you? Now they're gone! All because you got scared of something!" Thor shook him, not because he was genuinely angry, but because Loki's face was dead white and he didn't know why.

"I'm not scared!" Loki snapped it back, looking wildly again for the green light. It was gone, as was the crawling sensation within his inner ear. "I'm not at all ruddy scared!"

Thor studied him, seeing the lie plain in the wide, staring eyes. "We're going back. No hunting tonight."

"No! The season's over, we won't come out here again!"

"There's next year." The older boy was relentless. "Come on, you can have the night with your new book instead." He grinned, hitting on at least one possible lure. "You'll be even better prepared then. New spells now? Why, you'll be all but a full sorcerer in a year!"

"Thor!" Loki's protest got him nowhere. Thor looked back at the gleaming castle to mark their way, then stomped on the tiny magelight to extinguish it and forestall all other argument. He had to follow along, else Thor would simply drag him.

Every few steps he looked back to see if he could find that distant light. He couldn't, and with each step he convinced himself harder that he hadn't been afraid at all.

. . .

But the nightmare that wrapped itself around him in the dark hour before dawn reminded him he was terrified. Loki awoke with his hands flying up to his sweaty face, his still short mop of hair hair stringy and damp and stuck fast to his brow.

It was green in there, in the hollow of his mind.

All of it was green. That was the only thing he remembered – warped, wrapping colors all around his paralyzed form. Except the terror, and how he hated that sensation. He didn't want to be afraid. He could be stronger than that. He would make himself so.

. . .

The next night Loki crept alone into the woods. Thor was well and truly asleep, coaxed into eating heavy at late evening sup and Loki's own room set with simple tricks and lights to make it seem as if the younger brother was still obsessed with his tomes should someone come and see. A scouting trip, only. He would be cautious this time. He would stay low and silent, and he would get a better look at what it was, and then he would calmly go forth and study what to do about it. Because that is what a sorcerer should do, to serve his own curiosity and to use that in wisdom to save others. He believed in this utterly, knowing this was precisely how the future should go.

And as if to mock him, the distant green gleam did not appear. In pique, he went deeper into the woods than he ought, wrapped by the congealing blackness of the trees, and still he found nothing. Only the scent of fallen needles and rich royal loam. He shook his head and resolved to try again. He would spend the next day studying regardless, looking for something it could be. Anything. And failing that, there were seals and protections good against nigh any threat. When he went again, he'd bring the little knife.

Loki would not be afraid. He would be ready. He would protect Asgard from all threats, real or imagined. But he had to do it alone, because Thor could not see. He would protect Thor, too, because he loved them all.

That he did not sleep didn't trouble him. He didn't want the nightmare back anyway.

. . .

The feel of cold steel in his hand made young Loki feel braver. At every opportunity in the day he'd tended to its short but sharp length, touching it gently with the mystic cleansing oils just as Mother had taught. Its hilt was almost pure silver, traced with a few speckles of opalescent material, and it had a bloodgroove along his length marked with runes whose name and purpose he could recite in his sleep. It was a simple athame, but a good one. He thumbed at its crosshilt as he carefully skulked deeper into the woods, and deeper yet.

It was well past midnight and weariness clung heavy to his thin shoulders. If he wasn't careful, he'd end up asleep among the trees. That would leave him vulnerable, so he bit the insides of his lip and he dug his fingernails into his palms, and he made sure he kept alert as he hunted.

It took another hour yet and a little more, but there it was. The distant, deep gleam of green. It was closer now, though Loki still could not see a shape within it. The thrum followed close behind, rumbling its warning through his growing bones and he told himself he was not afraid of it.

His palm was sweaty now around the hilt of his knife, so he gripped it harder and brought it up close to his chest to protect himself as he continued to creep forward despite every screaming alarm in his mind. What was it? Dear gods, what was the ruddy light?

the light is us, we are the light, we are the breach between the living and the damned.

The thrum became the answer he rattled and his eyes flew wider yet at the thing that answered the question in his mind.

oh sweet and ripe little magician, we are hungry in the fields of Hel. Feed us.

The warning scream in his mind became a real thing spilling from his lips, understanding instinctively what it was. A haunt, a will-o-the-wisp, a trap laid by things not only dead, but worse than dead. He stabbed forward once with the athame, hoping to cut free some time to run, only to find a thicker section of the night's wood reached to slap it out of his hand.

"No!" he managed to gasp out, his terror reaching a crescendo. He could manage nothing else.

The hands plunged out of the dark and wrapped around his throat, thick and gnarled with burnt bone. The stench choked him before the strong fingers did, the rippling, rotting flesh of the Hel-thing filling all his senses so grandly in their horror that it momentarily blinded him. Then he felt those implacable hands knotting close around his windpipe as he was lifted by his throat alone. In struck, grotesque awe he realized the charred fingertips of the dead creature were struggling to crush the vertebrae below his skull.

Loki whooped and gasped for breath, each struggle only losing him the few scraps of life that were still his as his hands flew up to his face to try and pry himself free. In desperation as stars began to spark before his eyes he slapped at the thing instead and found no purchase. His tongue felt thick in his mouth and all he could do was scream and scream in his mind again, praying for any rescue, any at all.

Its breath came in closer to him, its fetid mouth whistling and sucking away at the final breaths of air he could release. It fed on him, fed on the escaping life and his eyes wanted to weep and bleed. He couldn't look away. There were only the stars of his impending unconsciousness, and the black outline of the thing taking him away.

And then he saw it plain, lit by a roaring white light, trying to gasp again as what seemed a new sun showed him its torn cheeks, the hollowed places where eyes had collapsed into the cavity, where moss and rot spilled in place of hair. He struggled again as the word of power came from behind, and he felt the slash of a knife as it cut through not air but ether and dimension.

"Thou art bade gone," came another cry. "Release what you took and run to your damned mother's skirts! Run back to Hela and cower!"

Loki was dropped to the ground as the thing howled in offense, his bruised throat still not letting him breathe even as he rubbed at it in a now-silenced plea. Everywhere was the light and he crawled towards it with a sob trying to scratch its way out of his chest. Behind him the thing fell back against the raw magical assault. It screamed and yowled, but it at last began to fade.

He saw the knife first, in that soft and elegant hand. Not his knife, but hers, Frigga's ancient athame, lit brilliant by magefire and her own indomitable will. Then it was gone, put away and he found himself scooped up into her embrace, he still small enough for her to do so. Now he could sob, though it hurt. Well behind her were the honor guards, tall and powerful in their armor of gold. Here in this hour, however, she was the stronger. "Mother, oh gods Mother, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." That hurt, too. Each word its own little blade behind his teeth.

Her long arms tightened around him as she turned away from the dark. "Fortunate you were I thought to check your room with my own eyes, little Loki, only to find your tricks at play." She didn't sound furious, only badly frightened, and he buried his face against her throat with another choking sob. "Do you know what you did?"

He shook his head, feeling the bones in his neck scrape against each other.

"There are places where the veil between realms is thin, and there are many of them in the deep woods. Some of them rub close between what is real and what is not. You were born sensitive to this, Loki. My little mageling boy. Things like that will feed on thee. You must learn better caution and care."

Loki nodded against her, his fingers knotting tight at the silks across her shoulder. He would, he silently promised to himself and her both. He would do everythingto not make this mistake again. Over her shoulder he could see the space between the trees where the thing had crawled through. The rifts and the glimpse of things beyond Death.

Curiosity took over as the fear drained, his body exhausted to its fringe but his mind still alive. The worst had come and he had survived.

The stories were real, he knew now. All of them.

He would study them, as long as it took. Everything that might try to make him prey, he would make them his own instead. And then he would never have to be afraid of the dark again.

. . .

The athame glinted in Loki's hand as he finished carving new runes along the circle that had trapped a boy's soul into the breach between worlds, the white silk spread across his knee while he worked. Not the first knife of his childhood; that had been lost in the deep woods and he'd never gone back for it. This was her knife, bound and empowered now to his hand alone by blood and magic. Frigga had not given it to him while she was alive; he'd taken it instead from the old jeweled case in her quarters late one night on a cautious visit to Asgard. The king had known he'd done so, and said nothing to stop him. The blade was always meant to be his in time. It had been a promise between them, long ago.

If the athame's magic lived, then in a way, so did a piece of her.

Loki did not focus on this as he worked. He'd given his story as promised, noting once the drawn, thoughtful expression of the dead boy in the silence that followed. He did not intend to give his secrets with it.

"There's bits of your story that's like your friends."

"And yours as well," he said, still distracted. "The shared experiences of youth, perhaps. An echo that ties story together. We are all lost in the forest, and we are all trapped high in castles made by our imaginative minds." He finished the last engraved line and looked up at the boy, his expression trained and neutral. "I'm done. When I activate it, you'll be given a chance to do what you need. And then, lad, you go home after all. I'll take care of the rest."

"I don't have a home." Thin knees pulled up to the eternally bleeding chest.

"Yes, you do. There's a door you were kept from, when your friends set you on the other side of the threshold in the manner they chose. It will be frightening at first, but the keeper of that final door is quite nicer than you might expect. Nicer than me by far."

"You're helping me, though." Black tears welled at the corners of black eyes. "Aren't you being nice?"

"Because this is a sorcerer's duty, something I haven't done enough of in a long time. I set myself to other things instead, in selfishness." Loki ran his fingers alone the edge of the athame without looking up at the boy again, ensuring the etheric integrity of the blade was intact. He started wrapping it carefully in the white silk again. Its part of the ritual was done. The rest was simpler. Base. His fingernail would be enough to complete it.

"How do I find the door when I'm done?"

At that, Loki allowed a small but real smile. "Follow the candlelights set along the windows nearby. They'll guide you out."

Soft wind rustled against the floor as the boy rose and then drew a step closer. "I'm ready. I want to go."

Without a word, Loki clenched his fist over the childish circle, digging his nails hard into his palm until they cut. A squeeze followed, encouraging out a single drop of blood. He watched as it formed, then fell.

The ripple of energy flowed out, bringing the wind with it. He closed his eyes against the surge of power, sensing the breaking of chains.

When he opened his eyes again, the circle, its duty now complete, was gone.

. . .

It was, as Daisy noted, a nice house on a nice property, with a large electronic gate that only opened if Stephen Tepper damn well wanted it to. But that did not matter to dead things. The boy's bare feet slapped against the black asphalt, the sound echoing and real in the dark. The door could not stop him either, though a wilted fragment of stolen mistletoe and sage was tied above the frame.

Tepper did not truly believe, not in his heart, and so his tools did not have power. He went through the motions. He did not pay a piece of his soul; how could he? He'd sold it off for mortal cash instead.

The boy walked through the oiled mahogany, still moving, still driven by decades of need and instinct, given purpose by a silver knife in a sorcerer's steady hand. Tepper was upstairs, huddled tight and only half asleep in his bed. Tepper slept as children might, restless and haunted by black dreams of screaming faces. In the day he felt no guilt. In the night, he was reminded of what he'd chosen to be.

The boy was the last reminder. He stood at the end of the brass bed frame and looked at the sleeping old man with his black eyes bleeding their black tears. He took a few more steps up to Tepper's side, reaching out a cold hand to caress the wrinkled, bristly face. This was the living curse, the final clasp of the chain that had imprisoned and terrified so many. He stroked again, then leaned forward to plant a clammy kiss on the taut forehead. Not in forgiveness. In promise.

Tepper's rheumy eyes flew open, dilating wide as he saw full the dead boy inches from his face. His mouth froze open, air catching and rattling in his chest as he saw and, for once in his life, believed in all the things his ancestors had sold him. Never before, save a whisper of wind along black candles. But now payment was due.

The dead boy reached out and grasped both sides of his face. Tepper tried to scream, but the boy ate it all instead, his face stretching and contorting as the wind spilled out of him to wreak chaos along the man's form, cracking against all the rich adornments displayed in this private room. The wind rose, and rose, and there were no screams. The dead boy permitted none. He took all the air back inside himself for his own, puffing his cheeks at the end like a hungry squirrel.

And then, for the first time in years, the dead boy laughed. Bell-like and rich and pure in the cold air that filled the bedroom. He let the man's face go, Tepper's soul hollowed out and his air stolen for his sins, and the dead boy turned to see the lane of lights that would take him home. Just as the sorcerer said.

They were waiting for him there. All of them. The bell-like laughs returned and they were not only made in his sweet voice, filling the night air with their joy and their hard-fought freedom.

The dead boy walked through the door, and he did not walk that last candlelit step alone. William took his hand and they went over the threshold together, into mystery.

. . .

Loki squinted up at the first hint of that cool orange light on the distant horizon, his hands stuffed in his jacket's pockets and his shoulders at ease. Before him lay the now-silent academy, emptied of its haunt and history both. There was one more thing to do, but it was a simple matter. The chain of events was already well in place long before he arrived. All he had to do was give it a little nudge.

He took one hand from a pocket and lifted a finger to his lips, almost in a kiss. Then he let the wisp of fire at its tip drop and crawl its way back into the building, where it would worm its way below into the tunnels. The chemicals, of course. Janitor's bleach and old methane, and forgotten tools and jugs and tubs in the shifting warrens below. The speck of fire contained itself until it found the right place to change it all, and then it spread into a consuming inferno, finishing what the dead boy had unwittingly nearly started.

First a vacuum, then a low explosion pulsed underneath the red brick building. Loki waited just long enough to be sure, glancing down when a crack suddenly formed in the concrete by his feet. He smiled and looked up to see the face of the academy begin to crumple in on itself. Good enough for him. He turned with a shrug and let himself out the gate while nature did the rest of the job.

A decade or so it would take, for a sinkhole to claim the unwanted stretch of land. Or this morning worked just as well, he'd decided, and have the story done and its victims buried proper.

Loki ambled down the brick path back to the sidewalks of the old neighborhood, grinning for himself as heads popped into windows all along the street to see what was going on at the cursed lot at the end of the lane. He lifted his head to enjoy the crisp air of the autumn morning, listening to the rising jabber as people began to call to each other with questions, never stopping, only moving.

Then he was gone, too, off to other mysteries of his own.

~fin

10/31/2015 MDS. All relevant rights remain in the hands of Marvel with no infringement intended. All realities are fair game. All half-mad demigods do whatever the hell they want, especially this time of year. Hope you had a great Halloween!