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Part 2
'offspring of your might'

Flanked by armed soldiers, Sigyn crossed the threshold of Loki's prison. His hands were restrained behind him. His expression was smug, touched with mild curiosity as to what futile tortures they were to attempt on him. Dizzy with thirst now that her prey was within reach, Sigyn could make no secret of her need. Breath coming in rapid pants, heartbeat in her teeth, she glanced at Director Fury with a gaze ravenous with desire.

'Do your thing,' he shrugged with an edge of distaste.

Pursing her lips with irritation, Sigyn rolled her shoulders, shrugging off her tailored velvet overcoat, and pulled it down her arms behind her. She flung the garment at Fury, who caught it with an air of awkward offence. Then she lifted her chin and met Loki's stare.

'Kneel.'

'Beg your pardon?' scoffed the god, bemused. 'I'm asked to kneel before a blood-sucking beas–'

A swift kick to the back of a knee from an obliging soldier dropped him before her. 'What are you doing?' he demanded, arching back from her as she crouched.

'Don't struggle, it'll only hurt,' she coaxed breathlessly, her tone tender with bloodlust, as she slid close to him.

'What is this?' he seethed now, rounding on Fury. The soldiers raised their weapons as he grew enraged.

Fury stated the terms. 'If you don't comply consciously you'll comply unconsciously.'

Before he resisted further Sigyn darted forward and seized her prey, curling her fingers into Loki's hair and wrenching his head aside to expose his carotid artery. He growled in outrage at the sting of her teeth in his flesh.

She answered with mewl of ecstasy as his essence coated her tingling tongue. Not the meaty heat of mortal drink but decadently sweet, like what she remembered of the taste of honey - the difference between a merlot punch to the mouth and a tawny port treat. A sanguine symphony of flavours played through a palate of dark treacle and velvety toffee, melting to a syrupy finish. The taste was incredible, quenching like only feeding for the first time bad been.

Sigyn bit down deeper and gulped the god's nectar. Soon her veins were searing with ice cold might, boundless energy suffusing her form and leaking from her pores in a glimmering veridian glow, until her body felt afloat as her strength soared beyond the constraints of the planet's gravity.

Loki caught a glimpse of her face as she was pulled off him. Her lips glistened with vermilion, her eyes ablaze with power and a look of pure animal satisfaction. She was monstrous. She was beautiful.

She was his enemy. And as he sensed his own seiðr radiate from the goddess his blood had created, he was gripped by dread. But it was worse than he imagined.

'The memories,' Fury demanded of the vampire. 'What's he planning? Where is the cube?'

Bewildered, Loki gaped at Sigyn as her expression shifted.

The trick was not to let yourself float back up to the surface - to dive for the pearls deeper down. Her eyes unfocused as she submerged into Loki's memories. A cacophony of sights and sounds cascaded through her senses, rising to a crescendo of the most potent emotions. He watched her slump under the weight of another mind, dark hair spilling through pale fingers as her trembling hands rose to clutch her temples as though they might burst.

The centuries had rendered Sigyn a beast hollowed out by hunger. Her own sorrows were long scarred over to saudade, and the gains no consolation for the losses. She cried only the fresh tears of her prey anymore, laughed only in their stolen joy. But a millennium was too much to sift through. Experienced as she was, Sigyn strained to locate Loki's plans, finding herself swept away by the stormy tides of his horror, loneliness, and fury. Her breath shuddered as pained voices echoed in her ears, feeling every word like a knife to her chest.

Am I cursed?

Small for a giant's offspring ... abandoned, suffering, left to die …

No more than another stolen relic … I'm the monster parents tell their children about at night?

I only ever wanted to be your equal!

Is it madness? Is it?

Sigyn was vividly reminded of the family she had lost to her curse. Unageing, she had been driven away by their suspicion. From a distance she could only watch her nieces and nephews bloom and wither like her siblings before them, followed by their own children. It was a cruel blessing to be cursed with eternal life in a mortal world. Her eyes winced closed as her clinical composure slipped. She had spied the unwanted runt cowering inside the villain's armour, whose mischief was forged into malice in a crucible of betrayal. She saw that he was driven to murder the father who had abandoned him, and forsake the father who had stolen him. He was the son of none.

She gasped to find her heart stricken by his longing, and a tear coursed down her cheek. His plans did not concern her any more.

Observing the ill effects of Sigyn's possession by his demons, an unwelcome pang of shame resonated in Loki's chest. Frowning, he ground his teeth against the lump rising in his throat. He was no longer a discarded pawn but a conquering King and all must see it. Her tears were a violation and a mockery.

'Where's – the – cube?!' Fury shouted in exasperation against the vampire's ear.

'Patience!' Sigyn snapped at the Director. 'He's old, there's a lot …'

She redirected her enquiry into Loki's blood a second time - and her ears filled with screams. Throat-shredding shrieks raked goosebumps down the back of her neck, and a stench of sour sweat and burnt meat stung her nostrils. Her stomach squirmed with sick terror at a hazy glance of bloody flesh blistering under lashes of a whitehot whip.

If you fail, if the Tesseract is kept from us, there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice, where he cannot find you. You think you know pain? He will make you long for something sweet as pain.

His mind was flayed, fraying knots ripped apart and rewoven by a needle bejewelled with an entity greater and older than she knew existed; a weapon passed from the Titan's hand to Loki's. Always listening, stoking, steering his hand even as he wielded it. The Scepter.

There was something kindred between the two artifacts. Sigyn followed the thread of association linking them, searching for the next pearl on the chain, and glimpsed the Prince's fists gripping the handles of a shimmering sapphiric box - different to pictures of the Tesseract in her briefing, like a casket - and a golden-armoured man freezing solid under a polar vortex unleashed from an ancient, arctic power.

An old word echoed on her tongue - something the overheating earth needed more than another weapon. Fimbulvetr.

'- How about now?'

Sigyn was drawn to Loki's rudimentary plans for her once he'd charmed or cheated her allegiance – he would have her any way – advising his operations on Midgard in gilded luxury, a lap cat drunk on his blood. Her revitalised cheeks warmed at his wish to taste victory on her lips.

'I-I …'

Her response faltered in her throat as she stared nakedly at the dark Prince. She saw how far he'd come to conquer, knew the power he commanded - feared the master he served just as he did. He could not be stopped.

Only saved.

'Get her out of here,' the Director called with a disgruntled wave of his hand, and a glove gripped her roughly.

Still flooded with emotion, Sigyn jerked away from the soldier's grasp. 'I'm not your puppet!' she snarled, her fists curling as an echo of Loki's rage ignited in her.

The soldiers redirected their weapons to the vampire. The mortal closest to Loki fired a series of tranquilliser darts into her. Unaffected, she plucked them out of her chest and lunged at the soldiers.

Chaos erupted.

'Contain her!' Fury commanded, backing away.

Loki began wriggling furiously against his bonds.

Sigyn engaged the other soldiers, whirling between them in a flurry of vicious strikes from her fists, elbows and knees, snapping necks and tearing throats. They were disposed of easily, but not before riddling her with bullets.

As the last man slumped to the floor Loki glanced around to find that Fury had swiftly slipped out of the cell, securing the two of them inside. Immobilised by pain, Sigyn sank before him, choking out hoarse gasps that rattled in her punctured chest. Finally pulling his wrists free, Loki regarded her calculatingly, unsure of her motives. Just yesterday she had taunted and threatened him, then today wept and fought for him.

He found himself edging toward her.

'What are you doing?' she rasped as he reached out and began unhooking the lower fastenings of her torn corset to inspect the damage beneath.

'Healing you,' he murmured briskly, and raised a hand over her perforated stomach.

'No need,' she croaked in protest. At his quizzical look, a masochistic smile touched her bloodstained lips. 'It's been - at least - f-fifty years since - I've had a good death …' Her voice faded to a whisper. 'This is nothing.'

Loki wondered what good a brush with mortality could do for a god – only weaken them surely. 'What would you have me do?' he requested as her breathing slowed.

'Hold my hand …'

Her eyes fluttered closed and her destroyed body went limp. Her request was an act of sentiment, such a thing Loki now scorned. He glanced down her arm.

She was unconscious, he bargained, and tentatively he touched a fingertip to her slender lifeless hand. So deadly moments ago, he found it now so delicate. After merely a minute, he heard air wheeze in her chest and before he could hastily retract his hand, her fingers grasped it tightly as her eyes drifted open once again.

Sigyn shuddered and groaned low through gritted teeth as bullets slowly reversed their path through shredded flesh, to re-emerge from their entry wounds, rolling onto the floor with a clink. Her muscles, knotted with pain, relaxed as her ruptured tissue knitted, sealed and faded, leaving the plane of her stomach pristine.

Loki stared, transfixed by the harrowing sight of her transformation from battered corpse to bloodstained beauty. Then his eyes slitted with suspicion. 'Why did you do this?' he asked, searching her face intently.

I know you, came the thought, unbidden, to her mind. I love you.

A cackle coughed from Sigyn's blood-coated throat in marvel at the tears he had dredged out of her. All her decades of thirst and ruin had worn out her once tender heart, leaving a husk interested only in prey she lusted to suck or fuck. But Loki's thousand years of wonder and woe had drained the murky depths of her ennui - pathetic, really - and resurrected some long-lost ghost of a soul still lurking in her bones. Undead had never felt so alive.

No other blood would do again.

'There's nowhere I won't hunt you to taste you again,' she vowed aloud, watching him with wild craving from the floor. 'You're mine.'

A skilled liesmith, Loki usually knew deceit when it appeared. He pulled his hand from hers with a slight flick, as though it were sullied. 'Sly words from a stranger,' he sniffed, guarding himself with cynicism. 'Who are you to invade the mind of a King with such foul sorcery?'

Sigyn pulled herself up to him, inclining her head and drawing in close until her breath brushed his gnawed throat. He stiffened, conflicted.

'His Queen,' she proposed, and her tongue swept the wound she'd made on him, savouring the last sugary trace of blood that had leaked from it.

Loki's eyes rolled closed as thundering footfalls carried down the corridor.