CHAPTER THREE

Less than ten minutes later, the two of them were back in the car, driving along the large strip of road. Although he would never admit it to a mere mortal, he was mildly impressed by Dev's skill at theft. The girl was a natural, her small, nimble fingers swiping assorted boxes and bags of supplies from the shelves without causing the adjacent objects to stir. It was a pity she was mortal, frankly. He wouldn't have minded having someone to do his dirty work.

Having a human companion did have its uses, however. He learned several things from watching Dev's heist. One, the humans had developed electronic boxes called "cameras" which were capable of visually and audibly recording any and all events in a given room. Mercifully, they were easy to dispatch, as Dev had demonstrated with a well-aimed can of tomato paste. Two, the humans had new ways of solving crimes. Once during the theft, Dev's hand had slipped a fraction of an inch, and her fingertips brushed across the shelf's surface. She cursed quietly at the contact and immediately rubbed the hem of her shirt on the spot where her finger had touched.

"Can't leave any fingerprints," she had muttered.

She did that quite often, he noticed…talk to herself. It seemed that whenever he turned around she was mouthing something under her breath, as though she was having a conversation with herself that could not be contained by the walls of her mind.

"Got a light?"

The sound of her voice jarred Loki from his train of thought. He sat up and extricated the side of his face from the cool glass of the window.

"What?"

Dev rolled her eyes at him. Loki noticed that she had something between her teeth, hanging limply out of the corner of her mouth, a short stick covered in white paper with a yellow band on the end.

"A light," she repeated impatiently. "A match. A Zippo. Fire."

"Oh." He remembered now. The mortals had a bizarre custom of inhaling the smoke from dried leaves. Many of the men in their great wars during the twentieth century had used the inhalants…but he didn't remember women using them. Then again, he didn't recall the women wearing pants either. Mortal women's place in the world must have changed since he last visited. "Certainly," he said lightly, smoothing over his momentary lapse in memory with a honeyed tone.

He reached into the small belt compartment at his hip and pretended to search for something. Matches, he thought, twitching his fingers slightly. The small pieces of wood with red and white incendiary materials on the tip. A box materialized in his palm. He indulged in a whisper of a smirk. Mortals could be so dense, never realizing the events that went on all around them that could not be explained by their "science."

"Will this do?" he asked, extending the box to Dev, expecting her to gratefully take the box from him to light the plants and feed her addiction to the toxic smoke.

She stared at him, her fiery eyes suddenly cold and flat. She paled.

Loki frowned. "Odd. I didn't realize inhalers of smoke were so picky about what they used to light their cigarettes."

Dev swallowed heavily. Her hands shook as she pulled the car over to the side of the road. "No. No, not again," she whispered frantically. Her voice thickened with suppressed tears. "Please, please, no. This can't be happening…" She swallowed again, gasping for air as a great weight was pressing down upon her chest. "It was gone. I got rid of you."

She stopped the car without warning, the brakes whining in protest as the vehicle ground to an abrupt halt. Loki allowed his body to lurch back and forth in keeping with the mortal pretense, but continued to stare at the mortal girl, no longer with amusement, but pure bewilderment.

"Got rid of me?" Loki repeated slowly.

"Not you…They were never exactly like you…But the others like you…You're one of Them."

Loki turned cold. She knew. She knew. How could she know? How could she possibly have found out? The Aesir and the frost giants had left their realm years ago, visiting only for the occasional dalliance, never revealing their true identities.

Dev screamed suddenly, causing Loki to jump so violently he hit his head against the roof of the car. "You were gone, damn it. They fixed me. The pills fixed me, you shouldn't be here."

Loki frowned, rubbing his head. "I see," he said without conviction. He wasn't focusing on speaking anymore. He was thinking, hard. He needed to know if this girl truly knew who he was...or if there was something else going on. "The others," he said slowly, measuring the effect his words had upon her. "Were they…er…'in your head' too?"

Dev looked at Loki, her face looking strangely gaunt. He couldn't see anything in her eyes; just darkness, a hollow void where there had been light moments before. "They were always in my head," she said quietly. "I suppose you were always in my head too, lying in wait for the right moment to strike…hovering on the edge of my mind, holding out for the opportunity to torment me like the others did. Stealing my sanity. Poisoning me. Deceiving me. Warping my eyes and my ears and my mind until I was a sobbing, quivering mess holding a gun to my own head."

"Your senses-wait, you think I'm a hallucination?"

Loki shut his mouth abruptly. He had said too much. He could use this to his advantage. If she thought he was a hallucination…he could do anything. This was an opportunity.

Dev didn't seem to catch his blunder. If anything, she seemed to expect it before he said a single word. "You really need to be more creative, you know. You specters…you always play the same games."

He smirked. It occurred to him that if he were to play the part of the girl's mind, tormenting her from within, he would have to act appropriately. He leaned towards her, leering with equal parts seduction and unspoken threat. "What sort of games?"

Dev looked away from him. She made a face as though she were going to be sick. Loki resisted the urge to chuckle; the girl's specters must have taunted her with empty promises of passion before. It was really her loss, he supposed.

"Always the same ones," she said coolly. "'What makes you think I'm a hallucination?' 'How can you be sure I'm just in your head?' 'Why do you say I'm not real?' Traps. Trying to trick me into believing them again…making me think that they're real."

"Ah," Loki said, his grin widening. "Let's pretend that I've never played these games you talk about. I would like to try them out myself."

Dev glared at him, but didn't reply.

"Why don't I begin with the first one, hm?" He tilted his head slightly. "What makes you think that I am a figment of your imagination?"

"The matches," Dev said quietly. "I went through the compartment on your belt when you were looking at the magazines in the store." Loki started. He almost burst out with a protest, wondering how she could have possibly pickpocketed him with his heightened senses. But she continued, apparently oblivious to his shock. "I didn't find a matchbox. Either you made one from thin air, or you're a hallucination."

Oh, the irony. "Or I could have stolen one from the store," Loki pointed out, smoothing over his facial expression into his previous, salacious look.

"Not likely." Dev raised an eyebrow at him. "The boxes in the store were made of cardboard. Your matchbox was wooden."

"This is your proof?" Loki said derisively. "A matchbox?"

"Believe me, that's just the start of the weirdness."

"Do tell."

Dev gestured vaguely. "You…your clothing—the little clothing you bothered to wear, I might add, which is exactly the sort of thing They like to do to mess with me—looks like something out of a Renaissance Faire. You talk like you're some kind of Victorian-era time traveller. You walked through the side of a plane…" She shook her head. "Again, I'm not coming up with many explanations beyond 'alien magician' and 'hallucination using anachronisms to mess with my perception of reality.'"

"Big words from a little girl."

"Little girl? I'm twenty-seven!" Dev said indignantly. She scowled. "Oh, what am I doing? I'm arguing with a hallucination. I should be calling a psychologist." She pulled out a small box and began pushing buttons.

Loki's eyes widened. No. Nobody else could know where he was. He snatched the phone from her.

"What the hell—"

"If I were a hallucination," Loki said, slightly breathless from the sudden lunge, "would I be able to do that?"

Dev licked her lips anxiously. Her eyes flickered, the void in her eyes drawing back just long enough to allow sparks of light to shine through. "I don't know," she stammered. "Maybe that phone is just a hallucination too." But her voice was no longer certain.

"Is it?" Loki rose from his seat and leaned in towards Dev, so close that he could feel her breath on his face. He put his hand on her face. "Then what is this?"

Dev pushed his hands away, a strange look on her face. "I don't understand," she whispered. "I've never been able to feel Them before. But I can feel you. I ran into you earlier. Your weight pushed me to the ground." She shook her head. "Why can I feel you?"

Loki pressed his lips together. There was nothing for it. The girl was going to call somebody with the box if he didn't tell her the truth soon, and then everyone would know. His veil of secrecy would be gone. "What if I told you," he said in a low voice, "that you were right?"

"You're admitting you're a hallucination?"

"No," Loki said, smiling. "Not about that. Something else you said."

Dev's brow furrowed. Loki could read the confusion in her eyes.

"A matchbox produced from thin air," he prompted her, "by an alien magician."

Dev's eyes darted madly across Loki's face, trying to take in every facial feature at once and failing. "What are you saying?"

Loki paused. "I am no figment of your imagination, mortal. I am real and you are correct: I did produce that matchbox from thin air, and I did walk through a wall."

Dev shook her head. "I don't believe you."

Loki let out a bark of laughter. "You're a good thief, mortal, but a terrible liar. You do believe me. But you're afraid. You're afraid that you've been taken in by your own imagination again. You fear that you're losing your grip on your own sanity. I assure you, you are not."

"This is crazy," Dev said, her voice shaking.

"Perhaps. But you won't go to a doctor. You're too curious. You want to see what happens. Secretly, you hope that you're right. You want me to be real. You can sense that I'm dangerous…and you love danger. It's your lifeblood. It feeds you, invigorates you. You are addicted to the thrill of living on the edge, always in danger of slipping. Falling off the edge of a cliff, down the slippery slope. Or worse yet, being pulled back from the edge, back into sanity, back into prison. Back into a cage of the mundane." He paused, letting the lull of his words and his voice settle into Dev's mind. She seemed to be staring through him, looking at some reflection of herself off in the distance. "You won't go to a doctor."

Dev blinked suddenly, realizing where she was and who she was talking to. She furrowed her brow as she examined Loki for any hint of deception.

"Maybe you're real," she said, "but I have to be sure." She turned the keys in the ignition. "Strap in."

"Dare I ask where we are going?"

"To visit a friend of mine. If you're not real, he can tell me. If you are…" Dev's eyes gleamed. "I think he'd be very interested to meet you."

Loki hesitated a moment. On one hand, he didn't want anyone else to know who he was. On the other hand, he had little other choice if he wanted the mortal to believe him without any magical interference on his part—which would be a pity, given her talent as a thief and as a way for Loki to observe mortal customs.

He relented. "Very well."

Dev gave Loki a small, nervous smile that looked more like a grimace and pulled back onto the big road. After a few minutes of driving, she turned to look at him once more.

"By the way…I never did get a name."

"You may call me Loki."