No trace remained of the managerial elevator by the time I looked back, disappearing into the wall as if it had never existed. In my hurry to escape, I hadn’t paid close attention to its exact location, though I could probably figure it out by recreating my path at a later date.

Hanging around the office would have been asking for trouble. Better to take my chances being stranded in Hungary. With luck, the attention would die down soon, unless any of the others had gotten themselves into trouble in the meantime. Apollo was the weak link in this scenario, being the only one of us with actual responsibilities. Coupled with his inability to lie outright, the loss of his powers had the potential to lead to some perilous footing ripe for exposure.

And the pope, depending on whether the tyrant checked in. If Grace was smart, he’d be keeping himself surrounded by people and cameras to discourage his boss from dropping in for a conversation.

I hoped he was smart.

Night had fallen across Europe, still early enough that lights were on and people were out on the streets rugged up in warm coats and scarves. Providence had manifested in a residential city block, and I found myself surrounded by tall, narrow houses and sumptuous apartment buildings. Comparing them to the ones in Singapore was night and day. Singapore was a city of shining towers, even the poor areas. The buildings in Hungary were closer to the blade enclosure I’d encountered in Facility J, low-rise and full of right angles, and to outward appearances the architecture hadn’t changed a whole lot in several centuries.

My current body wasn’t built for the cold. I wasn’t feeling the bite as much as I would while human, but I could already feel the lethargy setting in, trying to send me into hibernation until conditions improved. I fought it back with no small amount of effort. The last thing I needed was to fall asleep for three months while events went on without me.

Streetlights hung like teardrops from a post nearby and I went to them, pressing the ends of my legs to the glass for warmth. It helped. I gave it a minute then continued on, hopping my way from heat source to heat source until I was a few kilometres distant.

I couldn’t keep it up forever, though, not with my powers disabled, and it was only a matter of time before I’d be forced to sleep. Scouting out the neighbourhood, I worked my way into the attic of a house full of delicious smells and warm air, burrowing my way through the cracks of the structure until I found a safe warm spot in some insulation foam, and finally settled in. Exhaustion flooded in the moment I let my guard down. Perhaps if I stayed warm enough here, the hibernation wouldn’t set in.

I’d have to…

---

The green runelight of naudhiz roused me from my slumber and I snapped to, only to find myself in the clutches of a common house spider, being turned over in repose by spindly, frenetic legs. Fresh web was being secreted onto me.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

I speared it through the head with an extended foreleg almost as an afterthought, then changed into a rat and gobbled up the evidence of the crime, webs and all. Well, my powers were back online.

What day is it? I asked Grace, swallowing the remnants of my former captor. Instant regret followed. It had been too long since I’d eaten a spider and I’d forgotten how awful they tasted. All those hairy legs.

Wednesday, came the confused response as I purged my tastebuds of lingering arachnid. I’ve been trying to reach you. There’s a meeting. Everyone’s waiting.

I vaguely recalled Apollo mentioning something along those lines. Only a few hours had passed, then. Good. My abilities were on the sluggish side, but better than they’d been during the Vatican attack.

I became human again, nearly putting a shoe through the house’s ceiling in the process, and muttered to myself about the pact, just in case Odin still had someone on surveillance duty. All clear. As an extra precaution I clad myself in the uniform of the Swiss Guard, altering my form to that of Lorenzo the redhead, then sought out the location of the naudhiz rune.

Before I had time to register where I’d stepped through to, something that felt like a bowling ball smashed into the right side of my face. My vision went dark. Bones cracked and ligaments tore, and my neck hung sideways at an unsustainable angle. Raised voices babbled around me but none of the words registered. I healed the damage in seconds, reeling, only for another identical impact to come in from the opposite side to similar effect.

“- sake, Apollo,” I heard Tez’ voice cry in Italian through the roar in my ears. “Pull yourself together!”

My vision cleared in time to make out a ring of faces. In the middle was Pope Grace, looking like he’d just witnessed a murder. If I’d been the real Lorenzo, he might have. I was gratified to see the rune hand was concealed in a thick swath of bandages.

“I’m done,” Shitface’s voice uttered in a sulk, close to my left ear. The sound reverberated a little. “And I’m not sorry.” I swung my head in a somewhat dazed arc to look at him, and found him running a palm over the knuckles of his other hand. I’d rarely seen him seem so angry about anything. And making him angry was generally something I made a point of setting out to do.

The brute had hit me, I realised, raising a hand to my cheek. Holding back, but still.

Everyone appeared to be crammed into a bathroom. A large, spacious one, lined in grey marble and large silver mirrors, but a bathroom nonetheless. Mayari sat perched on the toilet lid, engrossed in her phone. Tez was leaning up against the minimalist vanity, and Apollo was with me in front of the shower.

“Eight hours I was powerless today,” he snarled at me. “Do you know how many people died in that time?”

“The usual amount?” I hazarded.

He raised a hand and began ticking off on his fingers. “Kalai-Pahoa caused an accidental arsenic leak into the water supply of Rio de Janeiro. Four thousand dead. Eight thousand more poisoned. He got demoted for that little incident.” A second finger went up. “Zealous nutcase in Moscow sees your stooge on TV talking about the end times –”

“Hold on –” Grace tried to interrupt, but the sun god showed no signs of slowing down.

“– and decides it’s enough evidence to justify shooting up a kindergarten to ‘guarantee their innocent souls a spot in Heaven’. Two hundred dead, and you’re doubly responsible for that one. No,” he added, whirling on Tez, who had just opened his mouth, and turned back to me just as fast with a third finger. “Factory explosion in Jakarta. Four hundred more. And those are just the lethal incidents. Trade through Asia is on track for severe destabilisation, and if Odin isn’t already on our case, he will be soon. Eight hours, Loki. All because you couldn’t adopt some common sense.”

Lucy was absent from the gathering, I noted, and everyone else’s eyes were on us, waiting to see what we did next. I wasn’t sure it mattered. Anything I responded with, Apollo would already have predicted and accounted for. It amounted to being put on trial without a legal defence. Even if I asked Tez to intervene, Shitface could overpower him with enough effort.

He’s missing the point, I told everyone else in private, cutting him out of the conversation. Couldn’t predict what no one told you. What we're doing is bigger, and they’re all going to die sooner or later anyway.

“Answer him and I will personally see to it you have a bad time,” Shitface growled, not entirely oblivious. No one moved. He took a deep breath.

He could have this one. The meeting would play out according to his preferred timeline no matter what I did. It was in my interest to make sure I came out of it as unscathed as possible. “Why are we in a bathroom?” I derailed, moving the topic onto a safer subject. “And where’s Lucy?”

Tez nodded towards the closed door. “Cameras outside. We’re in Grace’s hotel. This is the only place they don’t watch.”

“Audio?”

“Counteracting it. Although it might not be captured anyway. We’re taking no chances.”

I moved over to the door and grew a thin eyestalk from the tip of my shoe, peering under the crack. Sure enough, I recognised the same room from the earlier police interview.

Grace spoke up. Becoming a demon was good for him, I noted. One day in and you could already see he was more limber in the muscles, with less of the frailty he’d exhibited at the ritual. He’d ditched the formal regalia for a simple white robe and cloth skullcap, still a clear symbol of his office. I wondered if he ever wore any other colours.

“Lucifer can’t make it because – and these are his words, not mine – he’s ‘doing devil things’.” He shot me a look suggesting he was unconvinced.

I tried to calculate the approximate timezones in my head and realised I must have missed most of my day’s shift tied up in webs. Much of Floor L would have noticed the absence by now. I wondered if they’d put out an announcement yet. “It must be getting towards the end of his shift,” I suggested. “I’m clear. But Lucy’s the hot ticket item. Between the Vatican and my disappearance, every eye in the office will be on him right now.”

Apollo nodded. Putting a fist through my head seemed to have helped work out some of his anger issues, though he still wore the remnants of a scowl. “There’s an alert out. Joint collaboration between Compliance and Business Insights.”

“Not Odin’s team?”

He rolled his eyes. “As if the No-Gos would stoop to drudgework. They read the reports, but they don’t do the monitoring.”

I raised my eyebrows at his use of the nickname.

“I’ve spent more time sifting through petty office gossip than you’ve lived years,” he stated, challenging my stare.

“Can’t you put your team on it?” Mayari asked. She’d put her phone away and was paying close attention. She shifted her gaze to me. “And what’s this about a disappearance?”

“I tried,” said Apollo. “It raises questions, given the timing. Lucifer’s a big boy; he can handle it. And now he has a convenient spokesperson,” he finished, with a glance towards Grace.

“At some point I’d like to graduate from being the telephone to an actual participant,” the pope rebutted. “By the bye, I wouldn’t recommend wandering around looking like that if I were you.”

That last part had been directed at me. “Oh?”

“Lorenzo survived. They all did. Apollo got my boys out before the shit hit the fan.” He nodded to the seer, who made no move to accept the acknowledgement.

“And you don’t want duplicate discrepancies,” I surmised, changing form back to the rock star look I’d used when Shitface had broken into my apartment. “Well, then. If at any point a new mystery recruit turns up out of the blue, you know what to do."

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Tez had started grinning. “It gets better,” he said, catching my eye.

“Well,” began Grace, taking the cue, “turns out Lorenzo is recognisable from a distance. Especially in the age of these newfangled camera zooms. There were only so many redhead Swiss Guards on duty at the time, and there have been questions. I think some of the cardinals have been sniffing around.”

“Let them,” I said with a shrug. “He’s not going to be dispensing any information anytime soon. They can do their worst.”

“Yeah, you’d think,” said Tez. “Spilt secrets aren’t the problem, though.”

I raised both hands and pointed a finger each at the two seers in the room. “If they were going to connect the dots back to me, one of you would have warned us already. Otherwise what are you even here for?”

“Can I hit him too?” Tez asked in Apollo’s direction. “I'm starting to think you may have been onto something there.”

“Be my guest.”

“But first,” I interjected, before any further battery could take place, “what’s the actual problem?”

Tez’ grin grew wider. “Problem? I suppose you could call it that. Let’s put it this way: Rumours have been going around the inner ranks of the church that dear Lorenzo may in fact have been an angel all along, come to deem whether humanity is worthy of being spared from final judgement. On request, I went over in my lunch break today, staked out his hospital room for a bit. You know how when someone ultra-famous is on their deathbed and their room is crowded with awestruck onlookers?”

“Substitute ‘awestruck’ with ‘vengeful’, and sure.”

“Well, it was like that, but without the deathbed. And with maybe one or two TV cameras. The word ‘messiah’ may have been used.”

I turned my head toward Grace, who shrugged.

“I mean, it lends weight to my press statements,” said the pope.