Loki wasn't only the best candidate for the partner in crime, thought Gwen, he was the only one. She didn't want the other Rats to know lest they panic about the threat and scatter, and who else was there- James? The thought made her laugh out loud.

She checked herself out critically in the mirror, admiring the outfit she had been waiting for an excuse to wear since she had got it. She pulled the hood up and smiled as it threw her head into almost complete shadow, bent down and began to secure the complicated little harness around her waist which held two of Loki's knives on her back, parallel to her hip bones and easily reached yet hidden by the tails of her black coat. She preferred guns really, since they were quick and easy, but she was in a vindictive mood and wanted to feel the kills. It was the same reason her bronze knuckles sat in her pocket, waiting patiently to taste blood.

Her physical appearance had changed a lot over the last year; the roots of her hair had been dyed away, her piercings were more intricate and, perhaps the most noticeable, her new life meant that she now had some meat on her bones. Not much, only the amount appropriate for a mouse, but still. Damn, she thought, now he's got me calling myself that.

Arms wrapped around her waist and her hands reflexively went for the knives, and Loki leapt back as she went to drag one over his throat. "Oh," she said, "it's you. Think of the devil."

"Hmm." He cast an appreciative eye over her. "You look rather intimidating."

"That's what I was going for," she said proudly, "you don't scrub up so bad yourself."

He rested his hand on the back of her neck and kissed her in a way that would've made lesser women weak at the knees. Gwen, however, had shit to do, and no silvertongue, silver-lipped bastard was going to change that. "Come on," she said, "James is looking after Algernon for me, in case you were worried."

"I wasn't."

She led him up onto the roof of the squat building, framed by taller walls on either side. She jumped the small gap onto her ledge, holding her breath as she tried not to look down, then climbed down the building's drainpipe into a twittern, one of the alleys that was barely even that and more a tiny fissure between two buildings. Cities like this were full of them, and if you knew them like she did then not even the Rats would be able to follow you. Fortunately, nobody knew them like she did.

Loki dropped noiselessly beside her a moment later. "You have weapons, right?" she whispered to him as they found a route via shadows to the abode of the hall street gang.

"Only my razor-sharp wit," he replied under his breath. "of course I have bloody weapons. Remind me of the plan."

"Climb in through the window and stab anything that moves."

"Gwen, darling," he said, "that isn't a plan."

"We're not all blessed with your foresight, posh boy," she muttered, "besides, if I plan then things can go wrong."

"Infallible logic," he hissed, "really, I'm surprised nobody's thought of that before."

"You're such a dick."

"Well, my beauty and intellect come at a price," he replied, and she snorted. "Whereas I have yet to see any redeeming qualities in you, mouse."

"Uh, but you love me?"

"For reasons beyond my comprehension."

"I will stab you," she warned him, and heard him laugh.

"That was one of the first things you ever said to me, you know."

"It's good to be consistent," she said, fingers twitching nervously at her sides. "Loki, I… we can't mess this up."

"I had rather assumed that.

"No, you don't understand. Since last time you were here, they – they tailed one of my Rats. They tailed her until she was down an alley and the beat seven shades of crap out of her and then they… they did other things, too. Worse things." She stopped talking, since her voice was beginning to shake.

"Ah," said Loki. "Now I understand."

"She had to go to hospital."

"One would imagine so."

"And I... I don't like stuff like that. You know I don't."

"I do indeed."

"And it was my fault! I let that happen to her and it was my fault!"

"No," he said firmly, "it wasn't. Stiff upper lip, mouse."

She took a deep breath, and tried not to think about beds. She had been sleeping on the couch ever since her Rat had been attacked. "Okay. I'm good. Let's go."

Hall Street Squat was an ugly Edwardian building with boarded windows and graffitied walls, that had a delightful, stereotypically male smell of booze, piss and sweat. She looped round the block to the back entrance, which was somehow even less pleasant, and pointed out an empty windowframe to Loki. He nodded, and dropped his human glamour he had been wearing on the way there.

They walked forward silently, every step measured, and she climbed into the building first with a wrinkled nose beneath the scarf that covered her lower face. She followed the sound of voices, and the two were so silent it would have been possible to hear a syringe needle drop.

"… The bitch hasn't got a clue," a man was saying, "she's dumb enough to think her upstart brothel's safe from us, like we don't do this for a living anyway. Who the fuck does she think she is, trying to nick her trade?" A baritone chorus of assent followed his word, and the clinking of beer bottles. "We'll make her regret ever thinking she could make it in this town, eh lads?" they cheered.

They were greasy, middle-aged men in wife-beaters and unclean suits, who smoked cigars and blew the smoke in people's faces and thought it was funny to do so. They had contacts with the Mafia, but Gwen had better ones, and the Rats were better than them at what they did, too. But they were not the sort of men to go down without a fight.

There were ten of them, sat in the filthy lounge with the telly showing a football game that served as nothing more than white noise as they tried to excuse the fact that they had been run into the ground by a woman. They were so self-absorbed that they didn't notice the two moving shadows until the smaller one darted forward and stabbed her knife into the leader's neck.

Chaos ensued. The men were unprepared for an attack in their own domain, and were practically flying off the walls. One threw a punch at Loki, who swerved away from it without effort and, almost lazily, stuck a blade in his yellowed eye. The prince of Asgard had trained for a thousand years, and killing half the gang in a matter of minutes was about the same trouble as swatting a fly. A lethargic, obese fly. Gwen, meanwhile…

Everyone has a little bit of animal rage inside of them; humanity comes from ignoring it. But sometimes the savage nature breaks through, and that is the time when people kill with their bare hands and cannot even stop themselves from doing it. These bastards had tried to kill her. They had gone after her god damn Rats. And for that, she would make them hurt.

When the last man was dead, she wiped her blades on his shirt and resheathed them, wiping the blood from her face with her sleeve. "That was satisfying," she said to Loki, who had been watching her finish off the last couple with an incredibly devilish expression.

"Now what?"

"Now we wait for the other three to turn up," she said with relish, shoving a body off a table and sitting on it.

"I think you enjoyed that a little too much," Loki said, sauntering over to her.

"Says you," she replied, but didn't deny it. "We're not the good guys, Loki."

"Oh," he said, "I am well aware. How long until the other three come back?"

"Ben says they're never gone longer than an hour. We leave one alive-"

"To let the story get around," he nodded.

"They won't go to the police, they're too deep into the shit themselves. I was well impressed by the spinny thing you did, by the way."

"I'll have to teach you sometime," he said. His pupils were dilated with the adrenaline rush, she was pleased to note, and fixed on her. "Dead men's blood sets off your complexion wonderfully."

"Are you flirting with me?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "In a room full of people we just killed?"

"Well, we need to do something to pass the time until the other three return."

"I have a couple of ideas," she replied, and his grin returned.

She was lucky that Loki had given her enough good memories to drown out the ones that had made her scared of beds.

A/N so I realised that the ratio of chapters I have written to how long we have left until Ragnarok is significantly closer than I at first thought, so I reckon I can afford to update an extra chapter as well as fortnightly Fridays every now and then. Also, I just rewrote a couple of later chapters that aren't due out for a few weeks and I am SO EXCITED for when we get to that point. But we've got a while to go before then :)