The Nosferatu Adventures
page 353, chapter 353
1955
Nosferatu stood in the kitchen of the little townhouse, the kettle boiling in a hard whistle as she looked through the steam at Loki. She couldn't believe the last few hours but, there he was in living proof that they had happened.
5 hours earlier...
"So talk. Tell me how we can defeat the covens and Edmund?" our heroine said to the god Mercury as they stood in the middle of Astrid's kitchen in 1976. The god tilted his head and smiled.
"Oh you can't. He's still going to be brought over to this reality by his devotees, and Grandpa Van Helsing is still going to find his coffin and hide it in his house and you lot are still going to end up battling him forty years from now. I just told you what you wanted to hear so you'd let me in the house without much bloodshed." the sandy-blonde haired god replied licking his lips. He tilted his chin slightly as he looked over at the banshee before halfway turning towards the window. "Seems like we've got more uninvited guests." he commented just as Bacchus made his way towards the house. Grabbing our heroine, Mercury shimmered the two of them off into thin air. When they appeared again, they were in the middle of nowhere, a large rock formation just to the left of them which seemed to stretch out for miles. "There, that's a little more private."
"What the shack!" our heroine ripped her arm out from his grasp. "What the hell is going on then? Where are we?"
"What's going on is that the universe is sort of out of balance right now. It's out of balance because Loki isn't around. You, sweetheart, might not realize it but, he was more than just the trickster god of shapeshifters." he gestured with his left hand out palm upward, bending at the knees slightly. "In fact, there is so much you haven't clued into yet. For instance, did you know you were supposed to have been Rolf's mate." Mercury nodded his eyes wide. "Oh yes. You were supposed to have been claimed by Rolf, in fact, you were supposed to have been sired by him. But, Bacchus knew that if that happened, you'd never have come into your vampiric side. So he did what he does and poof!" he clapped his hands together creating a thunderous sound. "Suddenly Dagan gets the urge to snap your back like a twig and swap bodily fluids with you. Boom instant soulmate. And you know as well as I do that good old Ripper was nothing but your soulmate. Bacchus knew it, was counting on you two getting super close super quick. Because he knew about the big bad Frankenstein family curse. Only two children a generation. Knew that if you were sired by Dagan, knew that if you were Frankenstein by bloodline, you really wouldn't be much good to Loki in the grande scheme of things given Loki needed you to be the mother goddess for his Lycanthropes." he took a step to her right turning to look out over the large rock formation before levitating a few feet above the ground. He looked down at her then, the brim of his page-boy cap casting shadows across his face. Mercury landing silently on his feet as he continued to walk around Nosferatu in tight circles making her dizzy. "Bacchus didn't kill Loki by the way. I know you think he did, but he didn't. As much as Bacchus might be pissed off at Loki for getting to you first, he loves him too much to do anything that drastic." his British accent heavy with the last sentence, his grey-blue eyes sparkling.
"Then who did?" our heroine was standing still now, her head down as she forced herself to stop watching the god as he danced around her making her feel lightheaded. His dark trenchcoat floating around him like it had a life of it's own.
"What kill him? No one. You'd have felt it if he were dead. The covens have him. Tucked away somewhere." he gestured again to the large rock formation as it seemed like it was rising out of the ground some more. "Now, there are some more blah blah blahs we can rehash, but I don't have the time or patience to do that so let's get to the point. With Loki gone, I need you to step up to the plate." he raised his right hand palm facing her, head down in honesty. "You can feel that can't you? The rushing of electric jolts in your veins as of late." he waggled a finger at her before grabbing her arm and tracing the veins in her wrist. "It's what you were designed to do. To be! A god. It's why you were created by both them. Now, you have a choice, you can either take Loki's place. Answering people's prayers, rituals and summons or..." he trailed off dropping her arm roughly. "Or you can help me rescue him." Mercury leaned in slightly towards her, his hands now clasped behind his back. "But, if you decide to take his place, you need to be able to shift. And you know the only way a shapeshifter can shift is to have their soul. So you'd need to take your soul back from the safety deposit box that is Rolf; which would leave him vulnerable to Odin. Not too mention you'd be all claimable again. And wouldn't that be a bit of a pickle given you technically have two mates in two different realities in Edric and Reuben." he licked his lips again as he stared at her chest. "So...what do you say? You wanna be a full on god...I mean you're going to be downline anyways...this would just speed it up by about a thousand years or...do you want to play knight in shinning armor?"
An hour ago...
They fell through the portal landing hard in the middle of the street. Our heroine breathing heavy gasping for air, covered in dried blood from having fought both the amazon guards and the few coven members who had been holding Loki captive. Mercury was nowhere to be found. She felt something crack as she realized the full weight of Loki's unconscious body was laying across her leg. She didn't think she'd ever get the image out of her mind. Loki had been chained to the cave wall, half his body a skeleton. He reminded her of the character Two Face from the Batman movies, his jaw exposed, his one eye half out of the socket, his right shoulder nothing more than bones. His left side wasn't much better, only he'd begun at some point to shift. His left ear pointed like a wolf's but more gristle than flesh, his fangs exposed, his muzzle half formed like a stub, his left arm nothing but a paw to the elbow and scales like a reptile from the elbow to shoulder. Our heroine felt her bones re-align when the weight was lifted off her. Mercury had appeared and grabbed Loki as if he were nothing, hauling him over his shoulder and nodded in the direction of the townhouse. It took Nosferatu another long pause to be able to stand when she realized from the look of the neighbourhood cars, that they were in the 1950's. It seemed, she still could only time travel in reverse.
Loki lay on the sofa his body no longer a mismatched mess. He thought he'd been hallucinating again when he'd first seen her there in the cave. Something the god had done for how long? He wasn't even sure at this point, a decade or a month or a century? This time when he'd seen our heroine's face, felt her touch, heard her voice she did something different. She told him "I've got you." In the past whenever the hallucination had recused him, she'd had some quick witted remark about video tapes and old slasher movies. But, when Loki heard her this time, he knew deep down in his core that she was real. And with the last tendril of fading powers he could gather, he read her mind enough to remember how she viewed him. Saw himself through her eyes and shapeshifted to her ideal of him. Or at lest he thought he had.
Nosferatu stared at the god from the edge of the kitchen as she poured the tea. The pain he must have been in she thought? Depending on what reality you were in, Loki had been gone anywhere from a few months to a few centuries. She shivered as she thought about how much damage the guards had done to him. How he'd been locked up behind those bars of magick like being in a prison cell no bigger than a cardboard box. It brought back memories of her own captivity in the well. Walking across the length of the house, she placed the tea on the small table by the corner of the sofa; her slim pale hand hovering just above Loki's face. She desperately wanted to move his hair out of his eyes, to pluck the leaves that were still clinging to it's tangled dark knots. When the god shapeshifted into what he thought was his old self, he accidentally created a hairdo that was shoulder length and half filled with leaves. His brown eyes fluttered open halfway as he reached for her hand taking it. "I always knew it would be you." The words were never formed by the god's lips, but still managed to pass between them telepathically. Our heroine didn't scream, didn't pull away when Loki's fangs bit deep into the soft flesh of her palm. Just like when he'd rescued her from the well and allowed her to drink his blood, the time had come to complete the circuit.
"Uhmm." Mercury cleared his throat causing our heroine to jump. She blushed as she realized their very intimate moment had been witnessed. "I need to talk to you over here." he gestured for her to move away from the edge of the sofa, from Loki. "There's something I don't think you're aware of. You don't need your soul to be claimed by...a god. So before you go any farther with this blood exchange..."
"Too late." Loki said as he stood on very shaky legs. Mercury glanced at the other god sideways, his eyebrows knitted together in puzzlement. "She's been mine for a very long time. I've just never needed to announce it before now." Loki nodded towards her, his hair suddenly clean of the leaves as he ran his hand through it combing it back from his face. Mercury shook his head slightly in disbelief as he brought his hand up to Nosferatu's. He swore as he pulled his burnt fingertips away from the female.
Tune in again for another installment of the Nosferatu Adventures starring your heroine...me (straight up story. When things are left unsaid, there is nothing but chaos)
