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Chapter Eighteen

S he couldn’t believe her eyes or her ears.

One of ‘the Twins’, another of her siblings, was standing before her.

She’d thought, well, she’d been told, that they were living in a far off Realm with their mother, an unknown female their father had briefly ‘entertained’.

Since the information had come from the horse’s mouth, aka Loki, she’d taken at face value and moved on.

After all, Hel and her brothers only saw each other once a decade if they were forced–or more to the point, ordered by the All Father because some great evil was about to befall Asgard.

To say they weren’t a close family was an understatement, and one that she’d dealt with long ago.

Besides, between her mother and father, there had to be a plethora of brothers, sisters, and everything in between out in the universe that she’d yet to meet.

But none of that mattered in that moment. Nope, not even a little bit. Apparently, she’d been forcibly summoned to Shit’s Gonna Hit the Fan Party and not told to bring a fan.

Talk about a kick in the unpadded knee of her dead side…

Einn, the firstborn of the twins, was standing right before her, acting as if she was the Queen of the Universe, and issuing threats like one of the Ladies of GLOW, an insane and totally over-the-top theatrical eighties wrestling show Garmr loved to watch.

Talk about balls. Einn certainly had a brass pair along with gumption, tenacity, and more than her share of ego and bravado.

She truly was Loki’s kid. Only the Trickster god could have a child who had enough audacity and an ego big enough to every corner of the Earth and then some.

Add to it that she was not only threatening Hel, a goddess and her sister, but Einn had the utter gall to attempt to intimidate Liv…

A Valkyrie… And one of Hel’s closest friends.

Talk about stupid. The goddess’s mind was as close to being blown as she could ever remember–and that was saying something since two of her best friends were Fate and Destiny.

Did the oldest of the pair that her father had called half-blooded miscalculations think she could take on a goddess and a Valkyrie… At the same time? Did she… and this was the kicker… truly believe she could prevail?

Sure seemed that way.

“I must ask,” Carys chimed in. “Will you be able to control Einn without hurting and/or killing her?”

“I’m sure gonna try.”

And she was. At least until she could contact their father and get the whole sordid tale.

However, nothing that was happening, not even the chance that she would have to fight a family member, stopped her from being madder than a wet hen and ready to show her sister who was boss.

Oh, but first, she needed to know if twin number two was also on the scene.

Better to be safe than sorry… She’d hadn’t had contact with either of the twins in centuries and had no clue if they had strong enough Magic to do more than issue threats, if they knew how to use it, or if they had ever had even been in a battle of any kind.

Widening the width and breadth of her Magic, she used Einn’s mental fingerprint, an exact copy of her identical twin’s, and quickly searched the island.

Noting several rather large areas of contained Enchantment, Hel asked Carys, “Can you check those out while I find out what the hell Einn is up to? I just need to be prepared. We haven’t seen her or Tveir in so long and still have no clue who their mother is.

In other words, this is all a crap shoot with our collective asses on the line. Ya’ know what I mean?”

“I do, and I’m already on it. Go get ‘em, girl.”

Turning the full strength of her focus back to Einn, Hel acted as if Twin Numero Uno hadn’t just threatened her life but rather merely mentioned what she was having for dinner and slowly nodded. “Oh, okay. So, before you kill me, can I ask…?”

“No.” Einn’s answer was short and curt. Hel knew it was meant to piss her off and force her to act.

Well, fat chance. She’d come up against bigger and badder and come out the victor on more occasions than she cared to recount.

She’d been called everything from a freak to names she’d didn’t care to remember.

She had thick skin-at least on her live side.

There was no way she was about to endanger the life of one of her best friends simply because a sister she hadn’t seen in centuries had a wild hair up her ass.

She’d find out what Einn was up to and send the little brat back where she belonged with a bruised ego and second thoughts about ever showing her face on Earth again.

Opening her mouth to continue her questioning, Hel didn’t even get to so much as utter a word. For at that very moment, something super creepy, really wrong, and more disturbing than how Einn looked pretty much every day of her life, was developing right before her eyes.

Her sister was acting weird. Well, weirder than usual–and that was saying something.

She was suddenly having a conversation with herself under her breath, shifting from one flat foot to the other and waving her left hand around like she was air traffic control at DFW or the flagman at the Indy 500.

Worse than that, she was whipping her head from side to side and basically acting crazier than her untamable orange hair or her extremely puffy purple lips suggested.

A flash of something dark and ominous was the only warning Hel got before just plain padded cell weird turned to batshit absurdity. Sorcery, twisted and warped, filled the air and right before the goddess’s very eyes, her sister’s body started to contort, warp, and morph.

Einn’s gray, mottled skin bubbled and sizzled as her frame stretched taller and then wider, and taller and then wider over and over again.

It reminded Hel of those Stretch Armstrong dolls she’d seen human children playing with the seventies only her sister was not made of rubber and sand, was five-foot-nine, and most definitely bigger than a breadbox.

As if that wasn’t freaky enough, the grotesquely weird factor got kicked up to a million when Einn’s face started the same creepy transformation as the rest of her physique.

Her long, thin, pointed-with-a-hook-on-the-end nose projected outward as if pulled by an invisible string then sprung back over and over.

Her lips inflated and deflated at least four times in quick succession, and her bulbous eyes grew like beach balls attached to an electric pump, squishing out of their sockets then retracting with a squishy boing that made Hel’s stomach turn.

As if that wasn’t enough, copious amounts of dirty nasty Sorcery filled the air, creating a misty fog that stunk to the high Heavens.

It pricked at the inside of Hel’s nose, poked at her eyes, and made her skin itchy, scratchy and just a little too tight.

It felt like a million mosquitos had found their way underneath the thick Black Iron of her Death Armor and were jabbing her flesh, sucking her blood, and injecting her with their nasty venom.

Next came a wave an even more offensive stench that made the goddess’s stomach literally roll one way then the other.

The horrific odor was ancient, noxious, and had a decomposing quality that stuck to the back of her throat and made her want to gag.

Stepping to the side which any other time should’ve looked decisive, Einn’s movements were instead jerky and more uncoordinated than Hel could have ever imagined.

Of course, neither of the twins were the picture of grace and poise, but what the goddess was witnessing was downright creepy and almost robotic.

Einn would speed up, then slow down, then speed up again.

Throughout all the stretching and squishing her muscles were doing, she shuddered and trembled as if she’d stuck her finger in a light socket.

Had her muscles forgotten how to function?

Had her brain stopped sending clear signals or was it misfiring in some random, out of sync order?

Hel had absolutely no idea and wasn’t going to take the time to find out. Things were happening almost faster than her eyes could take in and her mind could comprehend-and there was no end in sight.

Einn’s more-than-usual oddly shaped head snapped from side-to-side, up and down and in circles like a demented, possessed bobblehead toy on the dashboard of a Jeep going a hundred miles an hour over every hill and dale in seven countries.

Her bulging, globular eyes flashed from their bottomless black to deep, blood red over and over while her wider, but still rounded and droopy shoulders popped up and down in an opposing rhythm that any other time would’ve resembled the Hokey Pokey.

Taking one slow, deliberate step forward after another, Einn almost hit the ground three separate times.

Her balance and coordination were literally nowhere to be found.

She was so wrong, so clumsy, and absolutely, without a doubt so discombobulated in every way possible that the only thing keeping her up were her outstretched arms whipping around like the blades of a windmill.

Slowly, weaving from side to side, Einn moved ever closer, but Hel refused to step back. Instead, she stood taller, held her Nightsword with more authority and never once blinked or looked away from her sister’s menacing gaze.

“Does she really think she’s intimidating?” Liv asked using their private mental link. “I mean, I’m working really hard not to laugh out loud and ask her what the hell is wrong. If maybe she got a bad batch of Dionysus’s hooch.”

“Yeah, I hear ya’,” Hel offhandedly responded. “But… Don’t you feel like something else is at play here? Like this whole morphing, transforming…”

“It’s called Shifting,” Carys chuckled.

Snickering, glad that the Dragoness with whom she shared her soul had been careful not to let the Valkyrie hear her, Hel replied, “Oh, yeah, that.”