Loki's Bride (THE WILD HUNT MC #2)

Prologue

Trick

Here's the first thing you should know about me, and I'm telling you up front so you can decide early how much of the rest to believe.

I have never once in my life told the whole truth in a single sentence.

Not a big philosophical thing. I'm not proud of it and I'm not ashamed of it either, the way you're not ashamed of being left-handed. It's just the shape my mouth came in. Somewhere between the thought and the saying, something turns a little, and what comes out is prettier than what went in.

The second thing you should know is that on the night this starts, I was nineteen years old and sitting in a holding cell in Garvey County, Nebraska, with a busted lip and a stolen car in the impound lot and about four hours of freedom left before the county remembered to charge me.

The cell smelled like bleach and other people's bad decisions. There was a drunk asleep on the bench across from me who kept saying a woman's name into his own shoulder. The fluorescent light had a flicker in it, one flicker every eleven seconds. I counted. I had time.

"Loveless."

The deputy at the door had a clipboard and a mustache he was clearly still workshopping.

"That's me," I said.

"That your real name?"

"You've got my license."

"That's not what I asked."

I liked him a little for that. "It's my mother's name. Whether it's real depends on how much you trust my mother, and I'd advise against it."

He unlocked the door. Not because I'd charmed him. That came later. At that point I was just a skinny kid with a mouth, and mouths get you exactly as far as the man with the keys decides they do.

They walked me down a hallway the color of old teeth and put me in a room with a table bolted to the floor, and a detective came in with a folder that had my whole short stupid life in it.

His name was Kessler. He was maybe fifty. He had the particular tiredness of a man who had heard every excuse in the book, twice, alphabetized.

"Silas Loveless," he said. "Nineteen. Grand theft auto, and before you tell me it was your cousin's car, I already called your cousin."

"How's he doing?"

"He'd like the car back."

"That's fair," I said. "That's very fair of him."

Kessler sat down. Folded his hands. Looked at me the way you look at a math problem you've already worked out and are just double-checking.

"Here's how this goes," he said. "You talk, I write, the county attorney reads it Monday.

You're going to tell me you needed the car.

You're going to tell me a story about your mom, or a job interview, or a girl.

I'm going to nod. Then you're going to go to Lincoln for eighteen months and come out worse. "

He was right about all of it. That was the thing. He'd read me perfectly. Eighteen months was generous, actually.

So I did what I always did, which was open my mouth and see what fell out of it.

"Detective," I said, "can I tell you something true?"

"That'd be a first today."

"I did take the car."

He didn't move, but something behind his face sat up.

"There it is," he said.

"I took it out of the lot on Fourteenth at about one in the morning, and I drove it two hundred miles, and I did it because I'm not a good person yet. I might get to be one. I'm not one now." I leaned back. "You've got me. I'm not going to waste your Friday."

Kessler opened his folder. Closed it again.

"Okay," he said slowly. "So why do I feel like you're about to ask me for something."

"I'm not asking you for anything." That was the lie.

That was the only lie in the whole run, and I dropped it right there in the middle where it'd get lost in the traffic.

"I just think you already know what I'm going to be in ten years, and you're deciding right now whether you want to be the one who made it happen. "

That's not a good argument. I want you to understand that. That's a nothing argument. That's the kind of thing a nineteen-year-old says in a movie, and in real life the detective laughs at you and goes home and eats a sandwich.

Kessler looked at me for a long moment.

Then his eyes went strange.

I don't have a better word. They didn't glaze. They softened, the way a face softens when it's recognizing somebody at an airport. Like he'd found something in me that he'd been missing for years and had stopped looking for.

"Son," he said, and his voice had gone rough. "I'm sorry."

I sat very still.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "The way we brought you in. Wilkes put hands on you and I didn't say anything, and I should've said something."

"It's fine," I said, which was true and which I hated.

"It isn't." He stood up. He was blinking too much. "You wait here."

Forty minutes later I was standing on the courthouse steps in the middle of the night with my belt and my wallet and a piece of paper that said the county had declined to file, and my cousin's car keys in my hand, and my cousin was apparently no longer interested in pressing anything.

Detective Kessler had shaken my hand at the door. He'd held on a second too long.

I stood there under the sodium light with moths going stupid around it and I thought, very clearly, in the exact words:

That wasn't me.

I want that on the record. I knew. Nineteen years old and dumb as a bucket of rocks and I still knew, the second it happened, that something had gotten into the room and rearranged the furniture while I was talking.

"Oh, that was magnificent."

He was leaning against the railing at the bottom of the steps. Hadn't been there a second ago. I'd have bet the car on it.

The suit was the first thing. It's still the first thing, fifteen years on. Charcoal, three-piece, cut so exactly to him that it looked less like clothing and more like a decision. In Garvey County, Nebraska, at one in the morning. Outside a courthouse with a hand-lettered sign on the door.

He was applauding. Softly, three claps, like at a golf thing.

"'I'm not a good person yet,'" he quoted. "The yet. Do you know what the yet does? It hands him a job. Now he's not a cop, he's a steward. He's got a stake." He shook his head, delighted. "Nobody teaches that. You can't teach that."

"Do I know you?"

"Not remotely." He came up two steps. Not close enough to be a threat. Close enough that I couldn't leave without a decision. "You've been doing it since you were what, six? Seven? Talking your way through doors."

"Sure."

"And it works about sixty percent of the time, and the other forty you eat a beating or a charge or a closed door, and you've built a whole personality around pretending that's an acceptable rate."

I didn't answer that.

"It is not an acceptable rate," he said kindly.

"Okay," I said. "So you're — what. You're recruiting."

"God, no." He looked genuinely offended. "Recruiting. I'm not a manager."

"Then what do you want?"

And here's the part I've turned over about ten thousand times since, at three in the morning, in motel rooms, on the shoulders of roads, once in a church.

He said: "I don't want anything. I saw something good and I wanted to say so."

That's it. That's the whole transaction.

No contract. No blood. No crossroads, no bargain, no give me a thing you love. My president traded an eye at the side of a road nine years later and at least he got to negotiate. At least somebody told Wolf Kane the price.

I got a compliment.

"That's it," I said.

"That's it."

"You're not going to ask me for anything."

"I'm going to give you something, and I'm going to do it because you're funny.

" He straightened his cuff. "You're already the best liar in this county.

You're going to be the best liar anybody's ever met.

That gap — between what you are and what you're about to be — I'm just closing it. Call it patronage."

"And what do you get."

"Entertainment," he said, and he meant it, and that was the most frightening thing I'd heard in my entire life to that point.

I should have run. I want to be clear that running was available. I had legs and a car and two hundred miles of dark.

Instead I said, "What's the catch?"

Because I was nineteen, and nineteen-year-olds ask for the catch the way you ask for the check — as a formality, because you already know you're eating the meal.

He laughed. He had a great laugh. That's the worst part about him and it always has been. He's good company. In fifteen years the man has never once been boring at me.

"There's no catch," he said. "There's a joke. Would you like to hear the joke?"

"Not really."

"One day," he said, "you're going to want somebody to believe you."

He said it lightly. A punchline. A guy at a bar with a beer in his hand, delivering the tag.

"And that," he said, "is the day it stops working."

I laughed.

God help me, I laughed. Out loud, on those steps, with the moths going around the light.

Because it was funny. Because I was nineteen and I had just walked out of a felony on the strength of my own mouth, and the idea that I would ever want someone to believe me — sincerely, urgently, with something on the line — was the punchline of a joke I could not possibly get.

Wanting to be believed is a thing people need. I had never once been a person. I'd been a performance with a heartbeat.

"That's a great catch," I said. "You should get that framed."

"It's not a catch." He was already turning. "It's a joke, Silas. I don't do catches, I do jokes. The difference is a catch you can renegotiate."

"And a joke?"

He looked back at me over his shoulder, and he was still smiling, and there was nothing behind it. Not malice. Nothing. Like looking into a room with no floor.

"A joke has to land," he said.

Then he was around the corner of the courthouse and gone, and when I got to the corner about four seconds later, there was a hundred yards of empty sidewalk and a parking lot with three cars in it and none of them running.

I drove all night. I went east because west felt like where he'd gone.

Here's what fifteen years of it looks like, in case you've ever wondered.

It looks like never being able to tell whether anyone likes you.