a long moment of studying his perfectly manicured nails and dusting imaginary lint from his ten-thousand-dollar Loki Line suit, Loki had answered. Not out loud.
The words had expanded in Vidar’s mind.
So you want death.
Vidar had only nodded. Loki had gotten that right.
He could quit without dying. After the first few centuries, Loki had no longer tied the immortality of his Originals to continued service. But without serving Loki’s cause, he had nothing to live for. He’d lived far too long already. He was centuries beyond ready—hell, beyond rip-roaring eager—to hang it all up.
There was only one way to do that. Loki had to strip away his immortality so that his body could die. Or be killed.
But Loki had only flung the cryptic answer at him.
Death must be your heart’s desire.
Then, citing a hot date with his wife, Sigyn, followed by a showdown with Thor over some epic squabble between their sons, he’d disappeared before Vidar could probe or persist.
Vidar grunted with a resurgence of frustration and tossed back another swig of vodka direct from the bottle.
What was a heart’s desire, anyway?
He’d never wanted anything with the all-consuming passion he supposed such a desire should be. And how in Ragnarok’s name could death become that to him? Wasn’t it enough that he wanted the damn thing, longed for its reprieve?
Evidently, not according to Loki. And knowing the god, he’d said his final word on the matter. That meant Vidar would probably live until Ragnarok and, if they were victorious then, beyond.
He’d often heard mortals moan, Someone kill me now.
He so sympathized.
He panned his gaze around. Epileptic bursts of colored light sundered the semidarkness. The air was pregnant with odors and emotions, pheromones and hormones, naturally and chemically induced. And the din. Only mortals high on one thing or another could find this not only endurable but enjoyable. Mating practices had sure changed since he was a mortal.
He’d give finding a recruit another thirty minutes. His life might be unending, but his patience wasn’t. And then…
His thoughts stilled. Noise, followed by everything else, disappeared. The heart that thumped only a handful of beats a minute even in extreme duress hammered.
A woman was sitting in a booth at the farthest end of the club.
And she was…glowing.
Kara winced at the pungent masses, the bone-shaking noise and migraine-inducing strobe lights, and damned herself again.
What was she doing here?
She streaked past this joint every day on her way home from the hospital. Tonight, some compulsion she couldn’t resist had made her approach, tell the hulking, BDSM-clad bouncers she wanted a peek inside. She’d felt certain that they, who seemed to let in only weirdos, wouldn’t open the door for unescorted, boringly clad meat.
To her shock, one had led her to a booth and ordered her a complimentary drink. Before she could worry that the mass of muscle was hitting on her, he’d left. She was still wondering what that had been all about.
So here she was. Sitting in the midst of what looked like a mass ritual for the exorcism of every inhibition and dress code known to humankind.
She’d never thought places like this existed outside of movies. And though most of the mayhem ranged from ridiculous to repulsive, she had no intention of leaving. Why, she had no idea.
Crazy.
But then, what was one more insanity? Her normal life had turned out to be a lie, and the truth…unadulterated madness.
She reached for the pineapple juice the waitress had snorted at when she’d ordered. She took a sip of the watered down but blessedly hydrating liquid, scanned the light-pulsing, body-packed, crimson-hued psychedelic space over the rim of the glass.
Suddenly the coolness sliding down her throat turned scalding. Her heart sputtered, her every nerve fired.
A man. On the far side of the gigantic room.
He had an elbow propped on the bar and a hip on a high stool, semifacing her. His eyes rose from contemplating the liquor bottle in his hand with disgust, slammed into hers.
If she’d been standing, she would have keeled over.
And that was before a path cleared among the crush, affording her an unobstructed view of him.
Her mouth dropped open, air stalled in her lungs.
This must be what a fallen angel looked like. Or a god. A Norse god. This impossible beauty. This hair-raising aura.
She could swear she saw the latter. It had a thousand hues and influences to it, each eliciting images, sensations, wrenching responses. And then came the physical details. The fluid power of his limbs, the pure maleness in his pose, the utter poetry of his proportions, the shoulder-length mane weaved from sunlight and bronze. And his eyes. She shouldn’t be able to decipher their color at this distance. But she did. They seemed to emit an azure force field that stormed through her, pillaging and possessing….
The rest of her breath left her with a choppy huff.
Okay. Congratulations. She’d just veered from insane to pathetic. Since when did she think such things exciting? Any man who’d tried such overriding tactics on her, she’d handed his head, right after she kicked his ass. Why would her mind be filling with images of this man walking over to her, dragging her into his arms and giving her no choice as he ravaged her mouth and exploited her flesh for his pleasure?
She was getting wet just imagining it. Her core was starting to throb, like it hadn’t done in…ever. Not when it hadn’t been in response to some seriously well-written erotica. No live man had done this to her before, taken hold of her imagination and libido and churned them into a frenzy this way.
He’d done it with just a stare.
Okay. Any time now. She was more than ready for it. For his eyes to betray a vapid shallowness behind their at-first unfathomable depths.
And that perfect body probably reeked. Those painstakingly sculpted lips probably smelled like a cheap, alcohol-soaked ashtray that spilled guttural vulgarities, and he probably had all the finesse of a phlegm-spitting lowlife and the intelligence of a unicellular life-form.
No one could be that…endowed in more than one arena. And his share of the physical must have kicked him out of line when they were handing out other attributes. The universe wasn’t that unfair that it would give him more advantages than the…distressingly obvious.
Decimating her expectations wasn’t working. She couldn’t stop her body from readying itself for all-out sex. Which it must be doing from genetic memory, since she’d never had sex that could be described as all-anything, except maybe all-boring, all-disappointing.
Then she literally couldn’t
