Saviors 101

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

“VIRGIL!” Loki screamed at him.

“Don’t you dare!” Virgil’s shout rang back from the living room. “If you think your life has been miserable so far, do that and you’ll find out just how bad it can really be. Hell, ain’t nuffin.”

Jeremy and Cassandra spun around in their chairs and smashed their knees together with a loud clack that had them both rubbing offended joints and apologizing. Rushing to the doorway, Jeremy stared out at the scene in wonder.

Loki, the shreds of his flaming-red Lycra bodysuit revealing far more muscles and olive skin than seemed likely on a Norse demi-God, stood on the bar. Or rather wove on the bar as if a personal typhoon of wind buffeted him back and forth in the calm room. How he stayed upright and didn’t lose the empty whiskey bottle from his failing grasp was a mystery.

By the front door, an engine roared.

Screamed.

A red-eyed Virgil, his arms wrapped around the steering wheel, revved the Trans Am’s engine harder.

He’d somehow managed to drive it up onto the porch and through the ramshackle front door without a scratch. Now it was aimed at Loki across a wide expanse of marble floor and oriental carpets.

Four hundred cubic inches of mean machine roared in the front hall. The headlights blazed forth like a dragon’s eyes. The dual exhaust billowed clouds of steam out into the night.

“VIRGIL!”

At Loki’s scream, Virgil gunned the engine again and popped the clutch.

The car leapt forward six feet.

The engine stalled.

Virgil smashed his forehead on the steering wheel and was thrown back in the seat.

He didn’t move.

The silence was louder than the engine’s roar had been.

The tableau held for another moment until at long last, Loki’s personal cyclonic storm claimed victory over his besotted balance, he tipped backward and fell like a tree, slowly at first then crashing to the bar so hard he actually bounced a little bit. The bottle rolled free of his hand, rolled across the vast oaken surface, and slipped behind it, smashing with a bright tinkle of glass that sounded like falling stars on a moonless night.

Cassandra rushed to the bar, so Jeremy raced over to the Trans Am.

Virgil was out cold.

Jeremy snaked an arm past the drooling poet, turned off the headlights and took the key. He stuffed it in his pocket so the man wouldn’t be able to drive off one of the many cliffs of Hell if he suddenly decided to go for a spin in his current state.

There was just enough room behind the rear bumper to shut the front door against the frost, so heavy that it looked like a jillion tiny stalagmites.

Jeremy took another peek. Hell had frozen over.

Then he thought about it. They were high in the mountains. And what could be worse than a hundred degree or more temperature swing every day?

Maybe Hell froze over each night and was scorched out each day.

Sounded appropriately nasty. And it might explain a few things on Earth.

“Still has a pulse,” Cassandra called across the great hall from her victim’s side.

Jeremy closed the door to Hell. So if a dead poet could drool, and a God who’d never been born had a pulse, what was with the whole life and death thing anyway?