Chapter Three

He didn't have to tell me twice.

I leapt off the seat and ran back to the main part of the club, searching desperately for Keisha so we could get the hell out of here. After a few minutes of desperate searching, I caught sight of the black bun of her hair bobbing amongst the crowd on the dance floor. She was laughing and talking with a woman next to her. I was taken aback when I recognized my hair color, my haircut, and even my same clothes.

Was this some sort of body double?

I thought that it must be the alcohol taking its toll on me. Or perhaps Loki had slipped something in my drink that was now making me hallucinate. There didn't seem to be any other explanation because clearly my friend was having the time of her life with someone that looked just like me, yet at the same time wasn't me.

I rudely shoved my way through the crowd over to my friend. Keisha and my body double both had their backs to me. Now that I was closer, I could clearly see that this woman looked just like me in every way, and it was almost sickening. I went to tap the woman on the shoulder, to demand to know just who she was and what she thought she was doing with my friend. The second my hand made contact with her shoulder, she vanished in a swirl of green light. I gasped and felt like vomiting. I was definitely hallucinating. That bastard must have definitely drugged me. Keisha had her back turned to me and of course didn't see it, and no one else in the club seemed to notice either.

I needed to get out of here and fast.

Keisha turned back around with a beaming smile. She didn't seem to notice that anything was different.

"Dahmn girl, you're right," she said, "he is sexy. And look, they're playing that song you requested!"

She was talking to me as if we had been together all night. I felt like I just intruded on a conversation that I had been apart of yet didn't know anything about. Keisha saw the look on my face and her smile vanished.

"What's wrong?" She immediately asked.

"I feel sick," I murmured. It wasn't a lie. I felt like I was going to either pass out or vomit, or both.

"You were just fine a second ago," she said, placing her hands on my shoulders.

"We need to go," I said, "we need to go right now."

"All right, let's go," she said without a moment's hesitation.

The events after that passed in a complete blur. Even if I wasn't really drugged, I certainly felt like it. My head spun, and my vision was clouded and blurred. Keisha had to guide me home because I couldn't see, hear, nor really comprehend anything. Eventually Keisha got me settled into my apartment and went home.

What few memories I had of the rest of the night were a confused mess of a nightmare. The hot feeling in the pit of my stomach turned into a sickening nausea, and I was sick several times during the night. When I wasn't vomiting, I was dozing in a restless half-sleep that was plagued by fragments of the memories of what had just transpired a few hours earlier. Loki's face, his smirk, and his eyes, glinting with insanity, haunted my dreams. I could still taste him, and I felt the remnants of his hands everywhere he had touched me. These areas seemed to burn, and every time I reveled in the almost delightful pain, I remembered that evil smirk.

"You will dream of me."

His words haunted me, yet for some stupid reason, I longingly clung to the memory of his voice.

Is this what it feels like to go insane? I kept thinking this to myself the longer I dwelled on his memory.

Sometime in the early morning hours, just before dawn, his memory relinquished its hold on me long enough to give me a few hours of numb sleep.

I didn't have a hangover when I woke up because I had only had one drink, but I was still so shaken up by the events of the night before that I still felt nauseous.

Black coffee, mindless TV, and crackers helped settle my stomach and my nerves. I spent the entire morning in a mind fog, and I questioned which events from the night before were real and which were fabrications of my own insane mind. As the morning drew on, I came to the decision that the whole encounter with Loki must have been imagined. My mind warred with itself, and it didn't help that I was without human company. The Lady cat was still hiding under the couch, but Caesar curled up next to me and purred out of concern and sympathy. His company helped at least a little.

This is how my entire morning passed, and I remained like this until the early afternoon. Sometime around 1, I was feeling decent enough to get up and get dressed.

As I took off my pajama shirt, I glanced at my shirtless form in the mirror above my dresser. It was the first time since before I went to the bar that I had looked at myself in the mirror. I gasped and tasted bile in the back of my throat when I saw a discoloration at the base of my neck. I ran over to the mirror to fully inspect it. On the tender skin between my neck and collarbone was a bruise and the distinct markings of teeth.

It was the same spot where Loki had nipped me the night before.

It had been sexy at the time, but now I was paying the price. It was almost like he had marked me as his.

"You belong to me now."

I guess the events of the night before weren't imagined at all. They were, in fact, extremely real.

Suppressing the urge to vomit again, I quickly finished getting dressed, taking care to pick a shirt whose collar hid the bruise.

Just who the hell was this creep anyway?

"You sure you haven't heard my name elsewhere, perhaps recently?"

I rushed back into the kitchen, threw open the laptop sitting on table, and began to search the Internet. I needed answers. I needed to know who he was and what he was supposedly known for. A simple Internet search gave me all of the answers I was looking for, and they certainly weren't what I was expecting.

After a Wikipedia page about Loki, the Norse God of Mischief, I saw several archived news articles about him, and every single one of them revolved around the events in New York with the aliens and the Avengers.

Shit, that's where I had heard that name before.

The more articles I read, the more the memories came flooding back to me.

Loki was the mastermind behind the attempted alien invasion, and the Avengers had fought off him and his army. My stomach churned the more I read about his war crimes. He killed eighty people in the first two days he was on earth, and he was directly responsible for the deaths of so many more in the battle of New York. The estimated death tolls from the incident… the numbers made me sick. What made me sicker is that I had just willingly kissed the man who was responsible for every single one of them.

I kept reading. Apparently Loki was the brother of Thor, the God of Thunder. The article said that Thor was raised to superhero status after the events in New York. It went on to describe his background, saying that he was a demigod from another planet called Asgard, and that his brother Loki was also a demigod from the same planet.

So this guy was an alien too. Fantastic.

What worried me was the ending of one article that I read about the aftermath of the battle. According to this source, Thor apparently took Loki with him back to Asgard, so that he may face justice for his crimes.

Wait a minute. If Loki was supposedly taken back to Asgard, then what the hell had just happened last night? The bruise on my neck told me that he was very real. He certainly wasn't on Asgard like everyone seemed to think. He was right here in Boston. What the hell was he doing here on Earth?

And what the hell could someone with this much power want with a boring human like me?

I closed my laptop. I had had enough. I found out everything I wanted now, and I regretted it. It made my actions last night all the more horrifying.

I decided that I needed some air. The sun was shining brilliantly in my living room windows and it called to me. I decided to go for a walk to get the shitshow from last night off my mind.

"You will at first pretend to be relieved, and believe that you have escaped me."

I decided that I wasn't going to let him have his way with me. He lad let me go, and I was determined for that to be the last time we ever saw each other again. He made it clear that he expected me to come back to him, but I had other plans. If he expected me to come crawling back to him, he was going to have to wait an awfully long time.

On that note, I abruptly put on my coat and shoes and strutted proudly out the door.

That little shithead was not going to have his way with me.

I got on the T and eventually wandered my way over to Chestnut Hill. I ended up taking a nice long walk in the area around the reservoir. It was refreshing to feel the snappy, cool breeze on my face. The reservoir was a long way from the Back Bay, and I had to hop around the T and change lines to get there. It was sufficiently far enough away from Loki for comfort, and for the first time in two days, my mind was at ease. Traveling out here was completely worth it because this walk was everything I needed.

I strolled past joggers and people walking their dogs. They were obviously all here for the same reason I was. The air was cool, but it was not biting cold like yesterday, and it was mild and refreshing. The brilliant sunshine caressed my skin, and I soaked it up gladly. My aimless strolling helped me forget about the events of the night before and all the shit I had read earlier. When the sun started to dip beneath the top of the buildings, I decided to get back on the T and head home. By the time my walk was over, I had completely forgotten about Loki and everything to do with him.

When I got home I set myself to the mundane task of feeding my cats and I. At the sound of the cat food bag, Lady screeched and came bolting into the kitchen like a bandit on the run. She grabbed her food dish and dragged it back under the couch, leaving a trail of cat kibbles behind. Caesar was the more civilized one, and once Lady had torn her way out of the kitchen, he nestled himself in front of his food dish and calmly ate.

After the cats were fed, I prepared a meal for myself. My fridge and pantry were sparsely stocked because, let's face it, I only ever cooked for myself. Cooking for one never required many groceries, so my fridge was just a step above a broke college bachelor's fridge. I never cooked elaborate meals for myself because, let's face it, who was I going to impress with my cooking? Tonight's meal consisted of broccoli, rice, and chicken, all cooked in the same fry pan. I had become an expert at one-pot cooking out of my laziness and lack of a dishwasher.

As I shifted around the contents of the pan, my mind drifted into that state of restlessness again. Despite the fact that I was overjoyed to be back in my apartment and back to normal, I felt that nagging dissatisfaction with the state of my life again. No matter how much I boasted about how I loved my independence and that I was a free bitch who did whatever the hell she wanted, the fact remained that I was alone. Every day when I came home from work I was reminded of the dismal reality that I lived alone. My cats were hardly adequate substitutes for human companionship. My loneliness wasn't just from a lack of romance. I had no consistent family, and I had only Keisha left as a friend. Everyone else I was friends with through high school and college had faded away, and we had lost touch so long ago that rekindling any friendships was impossible. Keisha was a nice friend and all, but she was hardly consistent. She didn't provide the true, close companionship that was missing in my life. In that respect I was truly, completely, alone.

I plated my dinner and sat down at the kitchen table. I aimlessly browsed the Internet while I ate, letting my mind be absorbed into the nothingness of the Internet. So there I sat, alone with my laptop, eating my own home-cooked dinner, alone. There was no lively dinner conversation. There was no sharing of the day's events with anyone. Hell, I didn't think I uttered a single word to anyone except the cats all day.

I was definitely used to this existence. Most days I only interacted with my co-workers and my cats, and on more than one occasion I found myself longing for more meaningful companionship. But such was the state of things, and no matter how much I tried to force things to change and to force relationships that were doomed to fail, in the end, I was always alone. And it seemed alone was what I would indefinitely remain.

My mind wandered its way into the painful memories that supported this conclusion. There were memories of my childhood. I was given up for adoption by the biological mother I never knew, and I was long forgotten by the biological father I never met. I remembered spending my entire childhood and adolescence being transferred from one foster home to another, never developing any lasting relationships with any of my caretakers. I call them caretakers because they weren't really family to me. No one ever offered to adopt me, even though I spent my entire childhood praying that someone would. I prayed that someone would adopt me as their own, and call me their daughter, and that I would finally have a consistent home and a family that I could love. But as the years wore on, my frustrations and resentment only grew greater. I became a wild and unruly child, which didn't help my adoption cause. I became known as that wild kid who needed to be further disciplined. No one ever offered to get to know me or to understand why I was the way that I was. Instead I was only transferred out of foster homes when they grew tired of me.

When it became clear that adoption wasn't going to happen, I set about making my own life for myself. By late high school, I concentrated on getting into college so that I could gain my independence. I was going to show everyone that I didn't need a family, and that I was capable of taking care of myself. I did prove this to myself, but unfortunately by the time it happened no one was left around to care. But I continued my quest through college for my own sake. I had my friends in college, but I never developed any lasting bonds with them. Bonding with people wasn't something I was used to, so I didn't do it, and as a result, the friendships vanished upon graduation.

There was one bond from college that I attempted to keep. I graduated with a boyfriend, and we had been dating pretty consistently for a couple of years. Looking back on it, the relationship was shallow, but at the time I was head over heels in love with him because for the first time in my life, someone had stuck by me. He proposed to me at graduation, and for the next six months I was the happiest woman on earth. I had thought, finally, I had found a true, lasting companion, and I thought I knew what it felt like to be truly loved. For six months I planned our wedding while I worked at my brand new job, and we lived in a beautiful apartment together in a suburb of Boston. It was the most blissful six months of my life. I don't think there has ever been a time in my life that I was that happy.

Then one day it all came crashing down. I caught him in bed, our bed, with another woman. I had never sunk as low as I sunk in that moment. All of the heartbreak, the anger, and the betrayal swept me away in a torrent of emotion that I never want to experience again. What started off as tears turned into angry, violent rampages, and those soon turned into a deep resentment and depression. His half-assed apologies weren't enough to repair the damage he had caused, and so I ended our relationship immediately. I turned my back on him without even saying goodbye. I was the one to pack up and move out. With the help of some friends I was packed up and gone within twenty-four hours of the breakup.

My bliss was over, and I was reminded again of the harsh reality that I was alone, and that apparently I was destined to be alone. In the months that followed I drank heavily. I partied constantly; I was like a wild animal. Over the months I had several one-night stands. These were all stupid choices, but at the time they were exactly what I needed go get over the heartbreak and the betrayal. I also severed my ties with everyone and everything that reminded me of him, and that unfortunately included all of our mutual friends. Those friends that I had left drifted away from me as they got their own lives, found their own spouses, and eventually started having children. This left me hopelessly and helplessly alone, and alone I have remained ever since.

To help me cope, I decided to move back to Boston. The city had always been my home, and it was always a source of comfort for me. I love my city dearly, more than I have ever loved any human being. I never dated anyone again. I occasionally went out on a date with someone, but I never dedicated myself to any kind of relationship. It has been almost ten years since I caught my ex cheating, and I guess I still hadn't gotten over it. At this point in my life, all these years later, I decided that I was better off alone. I liked being single. I liked the freedom it carried. I liked not being tied down to anyone. I liked being able to do what I wanted when I wanted. I never had to ask permission to do anything, and I was free to live my life the way I wanted without anyone there to drag me down and hold me back. Overall, I liked being alone.

But it was moments like this, especially around dinnertime, when I missed having a companion.

Caesar brushing up against my leg snapped me out of it. I shook my head. Memories were just that, memories. I had promised myself long ago that I would not let them have power over me, and I was dedicated to keeping that promise. I did what I wanted, and I was not going to let anything, least of all stupid useless memories, stop me.

Suddenly, Loki's words crept their way back into my mind.

"You are wild on the inside."

I groaned in frustration. I had successfully forgotten about him, and I was annoyed that my own stupid mind was reminding me of him again.

In some strange way, he was right. I was wild on the inside. I would be the first one to tell you this. That's why the monotony of my life was so unsettling to me. It was so out of character.

But Loki, he understood perfectly. He had me figured out completely. He was frightening, but still strangely sexy in a dark way. His dark smile had me captivated, and I was drawn into his allure. I closed my eyes and remembered his face. His expressions were so mischievous and menacing. I guess that's why he's called the God of Mischief. My wild side was drawn to him. He was right, and there was no denying it. Some dark part of my mind wanted to run wild with him. It wanted to abandon all notions of logic and reason and give into whatever sinful, lustful, and depraved desires my untamable side could conceive.

"But soon those dark desires will come back to haunt you."

And they certainly were. I was growing hot and moist from arousal just thinking about it, thinking about him, and about all of the dark desires he was awakening in me.

Shit. Everything he had said was starting to come true.

I shook my head and jumped out of my chair, causing Caesar to dart away in surprise. I was not going to give in to this little shit. He was not going to have his way with me. I was not his plaything, and I was going to prove that I was better than that. I was independent, and I was not going to be subjugated to his twisted plans.

I was not going to submit to him.

Because I was just too damn wild.