Eleven

THE DEPTHS

Willow woke up from a dream: she had dreamed of a garden.

She opened her eyes. For just a moment, she wasn’t sure where she was.

Her bed, large enough to comfortably fit ten people her size, was soft as a cloud and warm as a lover’s embrace, with silk sheets, big, downy pillows, and blankets woven from wolf pelts. The cavernous room she found herself in was warm, and a soft spring breeze flowed in through the open shutters, and the sun came with it; the room was painted with sunlight. There was a huge, wooden tub, with a steaming hot bath already drawn, at one end of the room; the bath smelled like roses. A serving tray sat on the sturdy wooden end table beside Willow’s bed; on it was a bowl filled with golden apples, plates piled high with delicious-smelling toasted bread, a pound of butter and big wedges of cheese, a pitcher and a wooden mug. The pitcher was filled with blackcurrant juice, sweetened with apples; Willow could smell it.

It was Willow’s favorite breakfast. And she knew where she was now.

Golden, gleaming, glorious Asgard: the home of the gods.

She recognized the room: it was Thor’s bedroom. It was all good, sturdy oak, with huge, absolutely exquisite tapestries adorning the walls; sometimes when she was there, Willow stared at those tapestries for hours. All but one depicted scenes of cataclysmic, blood-soaked battle: armies clashing, sword on shield, as Asgard fought back the Frost Giants in the icy wastes of Niflheim; Thor’s harrowing journey to Hel to barter for the soul of his brother Loki, and his legendary battle against five-thousand of Hel’s assembled demons which lasted forty days and forty nights; the Valkyries, fierce, beautiful, terrible shieldmaidens of Odin, riding down from Asgard to the field of some great battle, with wolves serving as their mounts, to select only the very bravest of the slain to sit by Odin’s side in Valhalla; the terrible siege of Asgard, when a combined force of demons, goblins, and Frost Giants dared to attack the golden realm itself when treacherous Loki found them a secret way through the defenses; the great goddess Freyja, fighting on, though wounded and alone, to protect a Norse peasant village on Earth against an army of invading demons, her sword soaked with blood, bodies piled at her feet, her blue eyes flashing like stars, her beautiful eagle cloak giving her wings; the monstrous wolf Fenrir, bursting his bonds and running wild in Asgard itself, slaying the gods, as his brother Jormungand, the great serpent who lived in the sea and circled the whole Earth, arose in wrath on the last day of Ragnarok to swallow the sun, at the ending of the old world, and the birth of a new one...

Willow never liked looking at that last tapestry for long. She looked away from it, and took in the rest of the room instead. She’d missed being there. It was good to be back. She knew she would have to leave again soon, so she wanted to appreciate every moment...

The bedroom she was in was part of Thor’s great palace, Bilskirnir; the palace was a massive structure with more than two-thousand rooms, and there were always a lot of guests, because Thor had a lot of friends, and he made new friends all the time. Bilskirnir was greater by far than any structure that had ever been built, or even conceived of, on Earth; only Odin’s mighty stone halls dwarfed it. But Willow always thought the place was perfectly cozy. Unlike most of the structures on Asgard, there was precious little gold and silver in Thor’s house; marble and bronze were equally scant; chalcedony, crystal and alabaster hardly to be glimpsed. In a soaring immortal city that glittered like diamonds, Thor’s house was good solid wood, through and through. It was an unassuming place, in its way, a warm place, good for talking, and eating, and celebrating, and making new friends; a place to appreciate all the little things that made life so sweet.

As she took in the room, Willow’s eyes settled on the one tapestry that didn’t depict men and gods giving battle: instead it showed a woman with red hair, sitting cross-legged on the grass under Yggdrasil, the great ash tree that was the pillar of the universe. The woman, really not much more than a girl in appearance, was meditating, with her eyes closed and her hands held out at her sides, palms-up: in one hand she held a miniature Asgard, and the artist’s cunning eye had captured it in every detail, from its lofty golden spires to its most modest huntsman’s lodge, even in so small a space; in the other hand she held the Earth.

The woman in the tapestry wore cut-off denim jeans, a light blue tee-shirt that said “Nerds Do It Better”, blue flip-flops with little red plastic flowers on the straps, and a bell-shaped, rainbow-striped, pink cotton summer hat.

Willow knew Thor missed her...and she knew she missed him. And she knew she loved him, and she always would.

She knew everything came down to love, in the end. It was the engine that drove the world.

Willow ran her toes along the silk sheets, and ran her fingers along the soft wolf-pelt blankets, and felt the gentle breeze caress her skin, and sniffed the air; it was intoxicating. The air smelled like it was brand new, as if it had just rushed down from some lofty mountain peak and came straight to her, today. Willow felt warm, and loved, and protected, in that place. She could imagine never leaving that bed.

Birds began to sing outside her window; robins.

“Perfect,” Willow whispered, and smiled.

Willow poured herself a mug of blackcurrant juice. It was Thor’s own stuff, just like everything else on the tray; the butter and the cheese came from Thor’s cows, the bread from his farms, and he grew the blackcurrants and the apples in his orchards. Willow had suggested mixing the two fruits, as blackcurrants, though tasty and a great mix with mead, could be rather sharp on their own. Together, the blackcurrants and the apples--big, juicy golden apples, the best apples Willow had ever tasted anywhere, apples so good she had sometimes gone whole days in Asgard eating nothing else--made a delicious blend. “Blackapple juice”, Willow called it. Its sweet taste lingered on her tongue. She gulped down the whole mug, and poured herself another.

She cut a wedge of cheese, and got up out of bed in her silk gown. Willow kept some clothes there because she visited often, and Willow’s gown had in fact been a gift from the goddess Freyja herself. The silk was cunningly interwoven with gold and silver thread, and the gown draped down her back like bird wings--which was only fitting, since it enabled her to fly. She walked barefoot across a soft, deep rug taken from the pelt of a giant bear-demon named Balevurd whom Thor had killed two-thousand years before. For a two-thousand year old rug, Willow thought it had held up pretty well. It was even luxurious. Balevurd might have been an evil baby-snatching bear demon but he sure was great to walk on.

Willow leaned out the window, and breathed in the air, and felt the sun kiss her skin. She watched the pure blue sky, and looked out at the gardens...

The air was a delirious mix of sweet, perfumey scents...Willow could smell peonies, oriental lilies, honeysuckle, gardenias, lilacs, orchids, roses, jasmine, all intermingling...

She and Thor hadn’t made love the night before, when they returned from saving Rebecca. There was a time when they would have made love, but that time had come and gone. Whenever Willow visited Asgard now, she and Thor slept in separate rooms, and he had prepared a guest room for her. It was vast and beautiful and filled with little treasures.

But last night, she had needed him...needed his arms around her, needed to feel his strength, his love. So she had stayed in his room with him, in his bed, and drifted off to sleep in his arms...and for the first time in days, she felt perfectly safe...even hopeful.

Part of her had wanted him to make love to her...she had been tempted. She knew he would have, if she had asked. But she didn’t...it would be wrong, and she wouldn’t let herself use him that way. They weren’t together that way anymore...they hadn’t been for years.

Their romance had been a beautiful, golden summer in her life. But it came to an end, as summer always does; summer turned to autumn, and things changed...Willow’s path intersected with other lives...other loves...

“It’s just...you’re immortal,” Willow said, as she walked with Thor through his gardens at sunset on a glorious summer day, picking flowers together; she was nineteen years old. “You can’t...grow old with me. And yeah, maybe I could deal? But your life...you know how it’s gonna go. It’s all...written out. Not like every second of every day but, the big stuff? It’s all right there in the sagas, you can open up those stupid books and see your whole life. I mean, you even know how you’re gonna die! You know exactly how it’s gonna happen! And you know...you absolutely know you’re gonna marry Sif someday, right? Even though you guys haven’t even gone on a date yet? You know it’s gonna happen, because the sagas say so. Someday we’re gonna have to break up anyway because...because...you’re supposed to be with her. Because you can’t ever...be with me.”

“Alas, though mortals are free to act, in many ways we of the golden realm are not,” Thor said. “The play has been written, and we gods are each given our roles to perform. Thus has it ever been.”

“Were you...gonna tell me?”

“I curse myself for a fool, but it had not occurred to me that you didn’t know. Though I know not the time in which the events will take place, whether they be a day from now or a century, my destiny, my life as it is meant to unfold, is as familiar to me as the very halls of my own house. Indeed, all in Asgard know it; and on a time, it was well-known in Midgard, as well.” He took her in his arms, and caressed her hair. “Willow, you must know I meant you no hurt...and if I could take back this pain I’ve caused, aye, if the cost were my very life, I would give it, gladly.”

She smiled, and looked up into his sea-gray eyes. The air was a delirious mix of sweet, perfumey scents; she knew Buffy and Faith would have loved it here. From where she was standing, Willow could smell peonies, oriental lilies, honeysuckle, gardenias, lilacs, orchids, and roses all intermingled, warring with each other...and, conquering them all, jasmine. Willow knew Faith especially would love it here.

“I’d never give it back,” she said. “The pain was worth it, to be with you...to love you, and to know you love me.”

“Aye,” he said, and smiled, and gave her a chaste kiss, on the cheek.

“So if you don’t know when stuff’s gonna happen, and you guys are all immortal...you’re saying you and Sif might not get together for like, years? Decades?”

“Perhaps millennia. I do not know; the sagas tell us of events, and the order in which they’ll befall, but no hint is given as to times. I only know that it is written in the sagas that I will wed Sif, and so it must occur. Sif knows it too.”

“So...we could maybe be together, and you might never even meet her while I’m alive?”

“Aye, my love. Or perhaps I’ll see her tomorrow.”

She looked away from him.

“I want you,” she said. “I’ve never wanted anything as much, but...I can’t live like that, baby. I can’t...always know someone might take you away. I’m sorry.”

“Do not be sorry,” he said. “All that matters to me is that you’re happy.”

She looked back at him.

“For a guy who like, totally breaks my heart? You’re still pretty awesome,” she said.

“I do not wish to break your heart, Willow,” he said.

“Too late. It’s...what we give to the people we love, y’know? We let them break our hearts. But hey, you’re like, totally a god? You’ll be over me in no time.”

She started walking again. He took her arm.

“No,” he said. “I won’t. I am fierce, and my enemies say I am proof against any attack, but you have conquered me; you’ve shown me that I have one vulnerable spot. Achilles fell when a treacherous arrow pierced his heel, your legends say; and let them also say that Thor, God of Thunder, was conquered when a beautiful woman pierced his heart.”

She hugged him, and he held her. They stood that way, quietly, for a long time, as the sun sank steadily lower in the sky.

Eventually, they resumed their stroll through the gardens.

“I just wish I never read those stupid books,” Willow said. “Fucking Loki. I thought he was doing me a favor when he showed me the sagas. I should have known. I should have known not to trust him...that he was just trying to find a way to hurt me. He tries to poison everything, corrupt everything. He’s like...a stain on the world. He tries to make everything...dirty.”

“He is treacherous,” Thor said. “But do not judge yourself too harshly; his honey-tongued lies have seduced thousands before you. His lies have ensnared me before, though I know not to trust him. And I’m sure they’ll ensnare me again. He is my brother, so my heart yearns to believe in him, as my head warns me to ’ware of him.”

“Yeah,” Willow said. “He lies.”

She was quiet, as she remembered the first time she met Loki...and his bright green eyes...and the beautiful lies that rolled so sweetly off his honey tongue, like stealthy soldiers sent to spy out all her ways...

“Baby...how do you do it?” she said after a moment. “How do you go through life knowing that whatever you do, it’s all been decided already?”

Now it was Thor’s turn to pause. A butterfly with golden wings alighted on his hammer, and then swooped away toward the lilac bushes.

“One of your poets once wrote, ‘the play’s the thing’,” Thor said. “I cannot alter the play, or my assigned role. I see the events that will shape my destiny: Odin, Loki, Sif, Fenrir, Jormungand, Ragnarok. I see them approaching, and I cannot stop them. It is all a play, one that has been performed many times before, and the play is important. It is the story of creation itself, and humanity is its author, and the Creator is their muse. In a way, Willow, I am a prisoner of humanity’s expectations. I am brave, and strong, because those are the things you mortals strive for; I will fight, and someday I will die, because that is how humanity’s great stories always end: the hero sacrifices himself. Even Loki plays his role: Trickster, liar, scoundrel, shape-changer, betrayer of his kin, and yet he has saved Asgard as often as he has imperiled it. Without him, I would not have my hammer. If I am what humanity wishes to be, Loki is what they believe the world to be: mercurial, untrustworthy, dangerous. Sometimes a friend, sometimes a foe, and though you may love him, you would be wise not to trust him. We gods all play our roles in your story, my love. But not everything has been written, and I have been blessed with some surprises: beautiful things I had not expected, and the sagas did not foresee. These flowers, for instance.” They had arrived at a yellow rosebush. Willow had never seen yellow roses in Thor’s gardens before.

“I had not expected these,” Thor said, and picked one, and set it in Willow’s hair. “All the roses in my gardens are red, and I had not planted these. And yet, here they are before us.”

He took Willow’s hand, and kissed it.

“You were an unexpected rose,” Thor said. “A beautiful surprise. My life has been enriched because you have been part of it. I cannot keep you forever; but I’m happy for the time we’ve had. You are my yellow rose, but someone else’s red one. All I’ve ever desired for you is that you might be happy.”

Willow nodded, and a tear ran down her cheek.

“I wish...I wish I was in the sagas,” Willow said. “I wish it could’ve been me. I wish I could’ve been the one...to give you children, like Sif’s gonna someday. I wish...I could have been a goddess, like her. So I could stay with you.”

A strange look passed Thor’s eyes, for just a second, then. Willow had spent whole days doing nothing but look into his beautiful gray eyes, and she thought she knew them...but that look always puzzled her. He looked at her that way sometimes, and she never could figure out why...it was like he knew something about her.

“You are more important than you know, Willow,” Thor said. “Verily, goddess I name you.”

Willow smiled. “You’re like, the awesomest boyfriend ever? Sif better not ever take you for granted. And can I just mention how annoying Sif is? She’s always so damned nice. Can’t she at least be a bitch so I can hate her?”

Thor smiled too. “This boy you’ve met...do you care for him? Does he make you happy?”

“Yeah,” Willow said. “But...but I don’t wanna lose you. We can...we can be friends, right? I don’t mean like, like, the way people break up and they’re always all like, oh, right, hey, we can still be friends? Because...because...”

Willow started weeping.

“I can’t lose you, baby,” she whispered. “I can’t...I can’t not have you in my life.”

“You shall never lose me,” the god said, as he wiped her tears away. “I’ll always be watching over you, and indeed, I insist that you come to Asgard as often as you can, and visit me; without your gay company to brighten it up, my palace will seem a grim place indeed.”

Willow giggled despite herself. “My gay company. Well, I’ve been kinda like, working on that? Trying to be, um, straight company.”

“You still speak strangely.”

“Okay, I need to kiss you one more time. And...and it has to be a great one, okay? Like the awesomest kiss ever because, if I can’t kiss you again after today? And I can’t because, me and my boyfriend are getting serious now and, and it would be cheating and...it would hurt him. But...I just need to kiss you one more time because if I don’t I feel like I’ll just...I’ll just...I’ll just die.”

They kissed, as the sun set...

Looking out at Thor’s gardens, nine years later, Willow still remembered that kiss...how it felt on her lips, how it tasted...

Everything came down to love, in the end. It was the engine that drove the world. More than anything we do, Willow knew our loves are what define us.

She ate her wedge of cheese, and listened to the robins singing. They were singing to her, she knew; they always sang for her when she visited. They looked right at her now, and made swift passes by her window, swooping by like fighter jets at an air show, as they sang to her. Thor had told her once that birdsong is actually a language it was possible to learn, and Willow was meaning to get to it eventually, right after she learned French. French, then birdsong, she had decided. Then maybe she’d learn how to cook...

“Hi, guys,” Willow said, as she stood at the window, basking in the light of the rising sun. The robins, twelve of them, halted their flight, perched on her windowsill, and serenaded her.

The sun was a golden crown in the sky, without a single cloud to mar it. The sky was perfectly blue, without a stain...

Willow saw a black dot in the distance. She wasn’t sure what it was...

The robins stopped singing, and flew away, zipping off haphazardly this way and that as if they had suddenly become frightened...

The dot was getting larger. It was a bird...traveling at incredible speed.

Willow straightened up and watched the bird, as it flew straight to her, swift as the north wind.

A second later, a raven hovered in front of her. Willow looked at its eyes.

They were green. And Willow recognized them.

The raven perched on the windowsill, and looked up into Willow’s eyes, and screeched at her.

“Get out,” Willow said, and turned away from it.

The raven changed; twisted, melted, grew. Sprouted arms and legs...and a leering smile, sharp and pitiless as an axe...and became a man.

“How rude! Now is that any way to treat a guest?” the man said, and climbed in through the window like some sly beast a-prowl, come to snatch a cradle.

Willow sighed, and folded her arms across her chest, and didn’t look at him...she looked at the tapestry that showed Fenrir and Jormungand destroying the world.

Fenrir and Jormungand were Loki’s sons.

Willow turned back to the man, and made herself face his green eyes.

“What do you want, Loki?” Willow said.

“You traveled to the golden realm, and didn’t stop by my palace to pay me the proper respect,” Loki said, and chuckled. Loki had a voice like an angel: soft as silk, sweet as honey, light as a bird. When he talked, Willow heard music in his words, and her heart soared; she felt her skin tingling, as at a lover’s touch. He bowed low to her. “Obviously it simply slipped your mind amidst all your cares, and you meant no offense,” the God of Lies said, with a mocking smile.

Loki was a handsome man, with long, black-hair, and green eyes sharp as knives, and he was tall and well-made in his body. And he radiated intelligence, and power...and sometimes, menace. Willow had been instantly, feverishly attracted to him, the first time she had met him, nearly a decade before. But it wasn’t only his looks that had attracted her. It was that honeyed tongue; he had bewitched her, seduced her, without even touching her. He was a charming rogue, when he wanted to be; a trickster. The kind of man you knew you couldn’t trust, but he promised mystery, adventure, romance...fun. He wasn’t shy and he knew just how to get what he wanted from anyone, but especially from women. He understood women, in a way Thor didn’t.

But for all his charm, all his intelligence, all his wit, all his effortless grace, Loki was a liar. Willow had learned that the hard way.

He stood before her now, in formal dress: silk tunic and trousers, leather boots, a silver, jewel-encrusted diadem crown, and a cloak of falcon feathers, which he had stolen from Freyja, cheating her out of it in one of his endless schemes; the cloak allowed him to assume any bird’s form.

His green eyes were constantly shifting, melting, changing, as they caught the sunlight; they seemed almost like two pools of liquid. But when Willow looked into his eyes, they hardened, and stared back at her bright and sharp as emeralds.

“Respect,” Willow said. “Fine. Hey, Loki, how you been? What’s up? How’s all the evil schemes goin’? Okay, are we done now?”

“Flippant girl,” he whispered, that mocking smile never leaving his face as he approached her. Willow felt his malice, and his power; he was like a black hole. She didn’t back away from him. She didn’t want him to see her fear. “Such a paltry veneer,” Loki continued, as he moved very close to her, nearly touching her. “Better to admit your fear than this feigned show of strength.”

He towered over her, and stared down at her, seeming tall as a mountain now. He caressed her cheek. His hand was soft, and warm. But Willow knew his heart was cold...poisonous.

“But I do not want you to fear me, my dove,” he said.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Willow hissed, and slapped his hand away, and walked away from him.

He laughed. “Ah, but you didn’t seem to mind being my dove when I bedded you, witch. You were positively enamored with me that night; aye, my sweet whispers inflamed your heart, don’t deny it.”

“Long time ago,” she said, without looking back at him. “And I’m like, so over you? So how about you stop annoying me and just cut to the chase.”

“Am I to be offered refreshment?”

Willow sighed. Asgard had rules: courtesy was important, even to enemies.

Willow turned, and faced him.

“Would you like something to quench your thirst, Lord?” Willow said, choosing her words with care. “Or something to eat? I have blackcurrant juice, as well as apples, bread, butter and cheese.”

“Perhaps a draught of that blackcurrant juice...is it sweetened with apples, as you like?” Loki said.

“Aye, Lord.”

“Marvelous.”

“I’ve only...the one cup.”

“No matter, dove. We’ve shared more than a cup before. And I’ve never minded the taste of your lips.”

Willow blushed, poured him a mug of Blackapple juice, and presented it to him.

“Okay,” she said, as he sipped it. “I’ve been polite. Now, pretty please, tell me what the hell you want?”

He smiled, and sat down in a great black wooden chair, a veritable throne, with a representation of Thor’s hammer, hovering in the stormy sky and sending down bolts of lightning, carved across its high back, and a footstool sculpted in the likenesses of Fenrir and Jormungand. It was Thor’s chair; the people of a Viking village had made it for him a thousand years before, from rare and precious ebony, and presented it to him as an offering, after he saved their crops from a terrible drought.

“Get up!” Willow shouted. “Get out of his chair!”

“Do you know what’s so delicious about you?” Loki said, and stretched out in the chair, and made himself comfortable. “Well, besides that sweet flower between your legs.” Willow blushed again, at that. “It’s your arrogance,” he continued. “That thou darest speak to your betters in such a tone. That you take such a tone with me, Loki--when I could destroy you with the merest thought. When I could swat you like a fly.”

A fireball appeared in the palm of Willow’s hand.

“Either get out of his chair, Loki, or you’ll have to prove it,” Willow said. “I won’t stand here and let you mock Thor in front of me. Last warning.”

They looked into each other’s eyes. Willow felt his eyes, slicing into hers. But she held on.

“Is this courage?” Loki said, and finally stood up. “Perhaps, and perhaps not. Mayhap it is a death wish, rather; your loves are gone, destroyed, erased from the world, and you wish to join them. That could be easily arranged, witch, if you aren’t careful.”

Willow allowed the fireball to dissipate, and sat on Thor’s throne.

She had been Thor’s lover; he always let her sit there. Her, and no one else.

“Still waiting for a straight answer,” Willow said, as she stretched out in the chair with queenly poise, her feet resting on the backs of conquered Fenrir and Jormungand.

“Quite becoming,” Loki said, and smiled. “You look splendid, sitting on a throne. Aye, a true queen. There is something about you, Willow, some secret I haven’t yet grasped; I’m sure my brother knows what it is, but he won’t tell me.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about. Plus? Pretty sure you’re lying. Since, y’know, that’s kinda what you do.”

“There is a darkness in you, and a light; they attracted my eye, upon a time, and that is no lie. And there is something more in you too, something deeper. You may think I bedded you merely to hurt my brother, but I swear I did not. Nay, witch, I desired you.”

“What I think is you lied to me that night, and hurt me. Because it’s what you do. Actually I’m surprised you never told Thor about that night. Thought you’d wanna, y’know, rub it in. Since you’re always such an asshole to him.”

“Tell him?” Loki said, and laughed. “Why in all the realms should I ever wish to tell him, when it is so delightfully entertaining to watch you keep it a secret from him? I hurt you? Nay, lady, you hurt yourself. I am a liar, aye; the greatest, most skilled liar there has ever been! But you are not so skilled. The only reason my dear brother hasn’t figured it out, the way you carry on, is he’s dumb as a block of wood. Secrets and lies are like wild beasts, Willow: they scratch and bite, they wound, they devour you from inside; do not keep them if you cannot properly cage them.”

Willow blushed again, and looked away from him. “It wasn’t...we didn’t... you and me, that night...it was before Thor and I were a couple. What I did with you...it wasn’t cheating. Thor and I weren’t together then.”

“Then why not tell him?”

“Because it would hurt him. And yeah, it hurts me, keeping it secret from him? But I’d rather I was hurt than he was. Now, for the last frigging time, what do you want?”

“Yes, the conversation has grown dreadfully dull,” Loki said, and quaffed down his drink. “I came here to offer you my counsel.”

Willow smiled.

“Be a dear and fetch me an apple, will you?” she said.

The smile instantly disappeared from Loki’s face. For a second, he looked shocked; a second after that, shock gave way to anger. Then, the smile returned.

“You’ve learned our ways well, witch,” Loki said, and chuckled, and went to fetch her one of the golden apples from the serving tray, and set down his mug.

They had been lovers, even if only for a night; in Asgard that meant he had to treat her with the proper respect if she demanded it. He had to provide service to her.

He came back with an apple, and presented it to her with a bow.

“Madame,” he said.

“Sorry lover,” Willow said. “I want the whole show.”

Loki frowned, but then his smile was back in place. He knelt at her feet, his eyes cast down, and held out the apple.

“Don’t get used to this, witch,” he said, looking up at her, his lips curled into a sneer.

“And don’t you pretend you don’t love it,” she said, looking down at him, her lips curled into a wicked smile.

She accepted the apple, and took a big bite out of it.

“So,” she said, with her mouth full. “Counsel, huh? Okay. Counsel away. Then leave.”

Loki stood up.

“You mean to travel through time, chasing that villain; in so doing you hope to restore ravaged Midgard, and have your friends alive again,” he said.

“That’s the plan,” she said. “Unless you have a better one.”

“Keep this in mind, witch. Time is not what you think. It is not a stream, flowing endlessly in one direction, nor is it a great hall filled with rooms you can just run in and out of all willy-nilly; it is a loop. Mark me, remember my words, I’ve done my share of journeying through the ages, and in my cauldron I can see them all; I can discern all the twisty paths time snakes down. Time is a loop. And the loop must always be completed. If not, everything fails.”

“Thought you couldn’t travel through time. Thor mentioned something about that to me when we were coming back here in his chariot.”

“My father can be rather humorless. Odin took it ill when I journeyed back in time and made a few...changes.”

“Changes? I can just imagine. What kind of changes, or should I be afraid to ask?”

“Nothing bizarre. Nothing grotesque. Just a few trifles, to amuse me. But Odin wasn’t amused. So he made me change everything back, and as punishment, for the next two centuries I cannot use my magic to travel through time; Odin has taken that magic from me. I can gaze into my cauldron, and watch the past and the future as one narrows itself down from infinite possibilities, and so becomes the other, but I can do no more than that. More’s the pity; the world could use a bit of polishing, and who really cares for the French anyway?”

Willow shook her head, and sighed. The scary thing about Loki was that he wasn’t kidding. Willow knew he was doing things like that all the time. How even Thor had managed to keep Loki in check for so long, Willow had no idea. “Okay,” she said. “So time’s a loop. Anything else?”

He took her hand, and kissed it.

“Only that I look forward to our next encounter, witch,” the God of Lies said, and smiled again, and looked into Willow’s eyes...and sent a shiver down her spine. “I’ve a feeling it will have...a rather different tone.”

“You know what, lover?” Willow said, gathering her courage, and looking straight back at him. “Thor was better.”

Loki laughed.

“Never lie to a liar, Willow,” he said. “With my brother you basked in your light, but I helped you explore your darkness...together we plumbed your depths. I know part of you wants to explore those depths again. To live in the darkness with me...to love, in the darkness, with me.”

Willow looked away from him.

And Loki melted again, and twisted, and changed: became a raven, and flew back out the window.

Eighteen hours later, Willow was still meditating, as she had been since the day before, sitting on the grass under the shade of Yggdrasil, the World Tree: the great ash tree, infinite in height, massive in girth, innumerable in its hoary old branches, that spanned all the realms of the universe.

She’d eaten lunch with Thor after Loki’s visit, once Thor had returned from council in Odin’s hall; the assembled warriors had agreed to delay their march on Earth until Willow and Thor had a chance to try their plan. Lunch was roast mutton, and black mead, and M&M’s: Willow always kept some there, because Asgard didn’t have chocolate. After lunch Thor returned to Odin’s council, and she came to Yggdrasil, and meditated; she liked meditating under that tree. It centered her. And sometimes when she was there, she felt like she was close to something...some revelation...but then it would always elude her, like some slippery fish, disappearing like quicksilver back into the ocean of her subconscious.

Yggdrasil’s roots extended all the way down to the Earth itself, and below it, to Hel, and it also had three wells at its base, that fed the tree. One of the wells, Mímisbrunnr, the Well of Knowledge, had given Odin the wisdom he needed to rule the gods, but at the cost of one of his eyes. And Odin had hung from Yggdrasil for nine nights also, all while pierced in the side by his own spear, in order to acquire hidden knowledge, that the well couldn’t give him.

It was said in Asgard that Odin used to smile at times, before he had drunk from the well, and before he had hung from the tree; afterwards, he didn’t smile anymore.

Willow opened her eyes, as the sun rose above the horizon.

She knew who Warren was going after next.

“Okay,” Willow said, as she hastily scarfed down a mutton sandwich and drained a mug of Blackapple juice. She hadn’t eaten since she started meditating the day before and she needed her strength. Her magic was back to full power but it wouldn’t be much help if she felt too exhausted to cast the spells. “I was able to pinpoint the exact time and place he appears next during my meditation. We’ll get there before him, wait for him, nab him when he gets there. He must think his Fyarl demons finished me off, so he won’t be expecting me. And he has no idea you even exist. It’s the perfect chance to get him.”

“Aye,” Thor said, as he strapped on his belt. They were alone together, in his bedroom.

“Thor, there’s...something we need to talk about,” Willow said.

He looked up.

“You seem...troubled,” Thor said. “By something other than the peril on Midgard.”

“Yeah,” she said.

He came over to her, and took her hand, and sat with her on the bed.

“Come, Willow, unburden yourself,” he said. “Tell me what troubles you. I cannot bear to see thy fair face so clouded with worry.”

“It’s just...I did something, and I don’t know if...maybe you’ll be ashamed of me now,” she said, as she looked down at her shoes.

“Tell me. I could not be ashamed of you.”

“When I was fighting Warren, before you rescued me? This is like all technobabbly but...there were two Warrens, okay? There was the first Warren, and I barely survived against him, and then suddenly another one showed up. The second Warren had all the same weapons, the weapons that had just almost killed me. And the first Warren still had Becca as a hostage. And I knew they were going to attack me together, once they finished like, making their evil speeches the way bad guys always do...”

“What is ‘technobabbly’?”

“Like, weirdly scientifically complicated. Like, over-complicated.”

“Go on.”

“So anyway I had two Warrens, and I knew I couldn’t survive against them both, and then they’d kill Rebecca. But the reason there were two was, they were the same guy? But from two different points in time. Like, y’know how you’re the Thor from 2009? Well what if, when you came back to 1972, the Thor from that time period--you, as you were in 1972--showed up too? Then there’d be two Thors. Get it?”

“It is...technobabbly. But I understand. Continue.”

“Well...since they were both the same guy from two different points in time, I knew that...if the one from further in the future was killed, the other one wouldn’t be affected. So Warren would still be alive, only one of his possible futures would be destroyed. And...there was no other way to save Becca, so... that’s when I called down that lightning bolt you noticed, the one that led you to me. I used it to kill the Warren who was from further along in the timeline, so I could even the odds in the fight, and the other Warren wouldn’t be hurt. But then the other Warren sent those Fyarls after me and escaped. Anyway, um...I guess...I broke my oath. So...I’m sorry.”

She was still looking down at her shoes.

“I guess you’re ashamed of me now,” she said, softly.

He lifted her chin, and smiled, and kissed her cheek.

“Nay, Willow, I am not ashamed,” he said. “I am proud, rather: proud of your cunning in battle. I think you misunderstood, in times past when I talked to you of your oath, and when I mentioned it to you again when we saved Rebecca. If you are in battle, battle for your life, battle to save others’ lives, if you must kill your enemy to survive, then that is what you do, and there is no shame in it. When we encountered that devil who tried to murder Rebecca, and you wanted to kill him, I stopped you because the battle was over; he could not hurt anyone else, and we could have turned him over to your lawgivers, and they would have jailed him. But he tortured Rebecca cruelly; she had the right to vengeance, and she took it justly, in fair combat. You had the right to vengeance too; I would not have stopped you killing him if you had not taken that oath.”

“Maybe...I shouldn’t have taken it,” Willow said.

“I think it was a good thing. You are an innocent soul, and killing is not for you. It is for me, for Rebecca, for Buffy and Faith. Not you. But if you must kill to save those you love, that is what you do, and it is not a violation of your oath. You swore never to take a life needlessly; those were your exact words, I was there. I heard your oath, remember; you swore it before me.”

“So I’m not...an oathbreaker? You’re not like, gonna shun me or make me run laps or whatever?”

Thor smiled. “You still speak strangely. But, nay. You are still my Willow, my precious yellow rose, my bright innocent one.”

She hugged him. There was a tear in her eye.

He held her.

“Come, my rose, battle awaits,” the god whispered, after a few minutes. “Another one of our comrades is in jeopardy.”

Willow nodded, and smiled, and stood up.

“Okay,” she said. “But I better get more hugs later.”

“Aye,” Thor said. “A fair bargain.”

“But look, the thing about Warren is? No jail can hold him. He’s been locked up twice before and he escaped both times. He keeps inventing gadgets and they always help him escape. We can’t just capture him. Unless you have some prison for him in Asgard? Like with maybe dragons or Frost Giants guarding it? But I’m not even sure I’d trust that. Anyone who can invent a time machine is just too dangerous. And...he’s gonna keep coming after my friends, Thor. He’s gonna keep coming until he kills them all.”

“Nay,” Thor said, and his eyes smoldered. “After tonight, that wretch will never imperil any of your friends again...one way or another, I shall see to it.”

Thunder boomed outside, and lightning flashed, and rain pelted the windows...

“Hey, sexy girl,” the man in the red BMW said, as the car cruised to the curb, purring like a cat.

Faith didn’t bother to look at him. She’d seen him cruising by her a couple of times; she knew he had to be a john looking for a hooker. Faith was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a hooker; it was a line she had drawn. Living on the street, you needed to draw some lines.

It was a cold, windy night, and Faith’s beat-up old leather coat and her threadbare blue mittens weren’t helping much. She hugged herself, and kept walking through the dirty old crusty snow that remained on the sidewalks, piled everywhere; Boston had just weathered two major snowstorms over the past two weeks, the weather forecasts were saying a third was on the way tomorrow and the plows had eventually just given up. Faith’s boots crunched through the snow as she marched along, trying to maintain a good pace, so she could keep her blood moving. The crunch of her boots was loud as it echoed along the quiet street. It was seven o’clock on a cold Thursday night in January and the city was carpeted with snow and things were quiet, even in Kenmore Square. She hadn’t been able to find a party or a couch to crash on. And she hadn’t eaten since the day before. But she’d be damned if she was going to hook for a meal, so she was heading for a shelter.

“Not interested,” Faith said, her voice echoing down the little side street off Kenmore Square, as she passed the car. Her breath was a plume of frosty smoke, drifting away, fading to nothing in the dark. The little street was so quiet and deserted she could hear the hum of the streetlamps. The only other sound was the whistling of the wind.

“Aw, come on, honey,” the man said, and got his car in gear and followed along beside her as she walked. “I mean, check me out. I got the flashy car. You chicks all dig the flashy cars, right?”

Faith glanced at him. Her alarm was going off. She had an alarm in her head, and it went off whenever thing started to get a little dicey. There was something about this guy she didn’t like...something was off. But when she looked him over she wasn’t afraid; he was a smallish-to-medium guy, maybe 5’8” or 5’9”, and he looked scrawny. He looked like a geek. Faith wasn’t worried he could hurt her. Unless he had a knife...

“Dude, said I’m not interested,” Faith said. “I’m not like a hooker or nothin’, okay? I’m just tryin’ to get to where I need to be. Take the hint.”

“What? A hooker? Now see, you’re like, totally misjudging me,” the guy said. “I don’t go to hookers. I never pay for it.”

“Hey, good for you,” Faith said, and kept walking. “’Bye.”

The car was still following her.

Finally, she stopped, and sighed, and turned to look at him.

“What?” she said. “What the fuck do you want?”

She knew what he wanted. He wanted what they all wanted...she knew it was all she was good for.

He parked the car, left the engine running, and got out of it. She stood her ground. He didn’t look like he was carrying a weapon. But she had a nice, swift kick in the balls locked and loaded if he got too close.

“A girlfriend,” the guy said, and smiled.

Faith smiled back, ruefully.

“No shit,” she said. “Welcome to being a guy. Got anything else to say? ’Cuz I got places to be.”

“What’s your name?” he said. “My name’s Warren. You wanna party? I got party treats...some X, pot, coke, whatever you want, hon. How about we go somewhere nice, like a nice restaurant, then we head back to my place and party. I’m from out of town? Just looking for some fun with a pretty girl. Someone to show me the town. Not like a hooker thing.”

“Not interested,” Faith said. The guy was pushy, for one thing, and there was something off about him. But even if there wasn’t, even if he had seemed okay, he just wasn’t cute. He had a big nose and dumb pompadour hair and greasy skin, and he looked like a clerk at a video store. Faith only let herself do things with cute guys, because that way, she sort of liked being there a little, and it was like a date...it wasn’t like she was selling herself.

Warren took out his wallet. “Look, check it out, not kidding,” he said, as he opened it and showed it to her. It was stuffed with enough fifties and hundreds to choke a horse. For a second, Faith considered mugging him. She thought she could take him by surprise: kick in the balls, grab the wallet, hop in the car, drive away. Once she was far enough away she’d ditch the car and eat steak for a month.

But hurting someone was another line...and Faith knew that if she crossed it, the consequences would be with her long after the money ran out...once she crossed that line, she could never go back.

She sighed. “Dude. Tryin’ to be nice here? And maybe you don’t want a hooker, but you sure do wanna treat me like one. Not interested, okay? I’m not a whore and you’re not my type. Why don’t you go get yourself laid somewhere.”

He laughed. It was a high-pitched, whiny laugh. If rats laughed, Faith thought they’d sound like that.

“All girls are whores, Faith,” he said.

“How the fuck do you know my name?” Faith said. Her alarm was going off louder now.

“First, the guy’s gotta have money. Y’know, for the flashy cars and the fancy condo and stuff? Not to mention taking you fucking shopping. Then he’s gotta have power too, because girls like making guys fight over them. A guy’s gotta be tough, be able to kick people’s asses in bars and shit. Does he have to be smart? Not so much. You girls don’t care about smart. Nice? Even lower on the list. Probably not on the list at all. Girls like guys who treat them like whores.”

“Hey! How do you know my name?!”

He ignored her. “Anyway, I’m gonna take you out on a date. I got money? And trust me baby, I got power too.” He pulled something from his coat pocket... it looked like a miniature crystal ball. Then he pulled out a pair of glasses with red lenses, and put them on. “Plus I’m pretty smart, if I do say so myself.”

“Fuck you, freakshow,” Faith said, and tried to push past him...

“And I’m definitely not nice,” Warren said, as the crystal ball flashed...

Faith was frozen.

There was a voice, talking...

“So hey, here’s how our big date’s gonna go. You listening?”

She saw a man...he was the man she had been talking to, but she didn’t know how long ago that was. She looked around. She was standing on a little side street, in the snow...somewhere...she didn’t know where. Faith wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there.

There was the light...and when she tried to do things, to think of things...she couldn’t. It was like...she was waiting...

“So first, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you, and you’re gonna stand there and let me,” Warren said, smiling. “Then after you’ve been softened up, the fun starts. I’m gonna strip you naked and torture you. Whipping for sure, I already bought the whip? Plus I’m gonna brand you too, y’know, like they do with cattle? I’ve got like this metal rod with my initials on the end. After that I’ll probably just try to get creative, see how the muse strikes me. I’m kind of a creative guy. Then after I’ve tortured you for a good long time, I’m gonna piss on you, and hang you. Maybe somewhere in there we’ll have like, a horse carriage ride or I’ll buy you flowers? But don’t hold your breath.”

Faith stood there. She waited. She didn’t know why she waited, but she didn’t feel like she could do things, or say things...she needed him to tell her what to do, what to say, where to go...

“I’m your Master,” Warren said. “That’s what you call me. Say it, bitch.”

“Master,” Faith said.

Faith knew something was wrong...but she didn’t know what it was...

She stood there, and waited for him.

He took her hand, and led her to the car. “Come out of the cold, sexy girl,” Warren said. “Let’s start the fun.”

He opened the passenger side door for her, threw her in the car, and shut the door behind her. He got in the drivers side. The car was warm; the heat was blasting like a furnace. Faith was glad. It was cold outside.

Warren took a necklace out of his pocket; it was thick, and fashioned from some sort of blue crystal, and it glowed. “Put this on,” he said.

Faith put the glowing blue necklace around her neck.

“You really are pretty,” Warren said. “I always thought you were the prettiest out of Buffy’s crew.”

Faith waited.

“Okay, since that pretty face is gonna get seriously fucked up soon, I think I better at least get a kiss. I mean, not much of a date if I don’t get a kiss out of it, right? So kiss me.”

Faith kissed him. His breath smelled like stale coffee.

“Kiss me better than that. Use your tongue.”

She kissed him again. He jammed his tongue in her mouth.

Faith knew something was wrong...but all she could do was wait...

Warren smiled.

“That was really sweet, hon. Okay, now I’m gonna punch you in the face a few times. Be a good girl and stay still for me.”

He punched her in the face, a clumsy roundhouse right. Faith whimpered, and her head bounced off the window...

“Awesome! You’re a kick-ass punching bag, hon.”

Faith had tears in her eyes, and her nose was bleeding.

But she couldn’t move...

“Okay, but, don’t wanna crack the window. So--”

He punched her in the face again. This time he held her by the collar when he did it, so her head wouldn’t bounce around. She screamed, and started to cry.

“Know why I’m doing this to you? Because of Willow. Okay, you don’t actually know her yet? And you never will, since I killed the bitch. But she had a special relationship with you...a special bond. She had your memories, in a way she was closer to you than even Buffy would be. Oh yeah, I did some research on your little fucking gang, I know you all backwards and forwards. Hey, I have an idea. Punch yourself in the face while I’m talking.”

Faith hesitated.

“I said punch yourself in the face, bitch.”

Faith punched herself in the face.

“Harder. Do it like you mean it.”

Faith punched herself harder. She fell into the dashboard and bounced off it, wailing and screaming now. And then she hit herself again...and again...

“And stop screaming please? The crying’s fun, but the screaming’s giving me a headache. So anyway, I hated that bitch Rosenberg and when I went back in time I decided to get the people she’s closest to. I got to fucking Queen Bitch Rebecca and then I tried for Willow’s girlfriend, but she got to her before me and hid her from me somehow. But I got to Rebecca first, and finished off Superbitch in the bargain when she came after me. You can’t punch for shit, you know that? But anyway I’m talking and I want you awake for now, so you can stop.”

Faith sat there, bleeding and crying, her shoulders heaving. But she was silent. She didn’t scream. Because he told her not to...

“And yeah, I know, bad guy giving speeches? I just like thinking out loud. So anyway if Willow was alive to find your body later tonight, after I’m done with you? Naked and beaten and whipped and branded like an animal, then pissed on and hanged? It would’ve hurt her more than anything else I can think of, it would’ve broken her heart in half. Though I suppose there’s a tiny statistical possibility Superbitch might actually be alive out there somewhere. I’m like, ninety-nine percent sure she’s dead? But she’s surprised me before. Hence the necklace. Can’t ever be too careful. Either way, it’s a win-win for me. If she’s dead good riddance, if she’s alive she’ll find you after I’m done, and what do we call that? Best revenge ever. Seriously? I rock.”

He got the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb.

“Don’t think the kicking the shit out of you part’s done? We got a ways to go on that. I’m just taking us somewhere a little more private. What’s my name?”

Faith shook her head, and didn’t answer him.

“What’s my fucking name?” he shouted.

“Master,” Faith whispered.

“Fucking right,” he said.

“Okay...problem,” Willow said, as the time portal faded away, shimmering and undulating in the air like the surface of a rippling lake that was gradually becoming still again, and they found themselves standing on a deserted street.

They were in Boston, on a little side street off Commonwealth Avenue, in Kenmore Square, near where the Red Sox played. Willow knew the area by heart.

It was January 9th, 1997...and it was night.

“Something is amiss?” Thor said. Willow had thrown a glamour around him, since Thunder Gods didn’t normally show up in Boston; he looked just like Viggo Mortensen. Willow knew the Lord of the Rings movies were still a good few years away, so no one would recognize him.

She had thrown a glamour around Thor’s chariot, too; it was a Ford Mustang now.

“We were supposed to get here during the day!” Willow shouted. “Oh Goddess...he...he’s been here for hours already!”

“But how?” Thor said.

“I don’t know! We should’ve shown up hours ago! He might have found her by now! He might have...oh Goddess...”

“Wait a moment. You say we’ve shown up too late, but what if we are too early? Mayhap we’ve arrived the previous night?”

“Okay...okay yeah, maybe. Gotta find a newspaper. Come on!”

She ran through the snow down to the end of the block, where it intersected with Kenmore Square. Kenmore Square was quiet; there were hardly any cars and no people. But the little variety store on the corner was open. Willow barreled through the door and ran to the newspaper rack.

“FUCK!” she shouted, as she scanned the two daily newspapers. “It’s January ninth, we’re too late!”

“Hey!” the fat cashier reading the racing form behind the counter said. “Chill, willya, lady? Geez. Tryin’ to read here.”

“Come on!” Willow screamed, and grabbed Thor’s hand and dragged him out of the store. “And call the goats!”

“Tanngrisnir! Tanngnjóstr! Come!” Thor shouted. An instant later, a Ford Mustang screeched around the corner.

“Where are we going?” Thor said, as they got into the car, which was actually a chariot drawn by two goats.

“The YWCA,” Willow said. “I need to cast a locator spell to find Faith, she keeps a backpack full of clothes there.” She grabbed her handbag from the back seat. It was made in Asgard from the hide of a goblin because her old one had burned in a fire in 1972, and when she thought about things like that Willow just wanted to pinch herself to see if she was dreaming, and then, depending on the answer, throw up her hands and find a nice, quiet place to get completely drunk. “Get the goats up in the air, I’ll show you the way, it’s close by.”

In seconds, they had soared up to the clouds; Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr were fast. Willow’s stomach didn’t lurch like it used to in the old days; she had been in Thor’s chariot often enough that she was used to it now. It actually gave a smoother ride than any of her cars. Willow looked down at the city, and pointed out the YWCA about ten blocks from Kenmore Square, and undid the glamour around the chariot at the same time. A flying Ford Mustang was about as bad as a flying goat-drawn chariot. And she knew she had to conserve her strength... because instead of taking Warren by surprise, now they were in for a fight.

Thor pulled at the reins, and guided the goats down toward the city. “Do we know what the scoundrel’s plan is this time?”

“The visions I get when I meditate can be kinda vague?” Willow said. “I saw him appear here, and I know he’s after Faith...other than that, nothing. He has to be trying to kill her. But how he’ll do it, if he’ll try to get clever or if he’ll just shoot her, I got no idea. But...he’s already had time...he’s had hours. For all I know...she’s...she’s...” Willow held her head in her hands, as a tear rolled down her cheek.

“Do not lose hope,” Thor said, and put his hand on her shoulder. “Mayhap we can still be in time.”

“Time,” Willow said. “Fucking time. Time travel’s a rip-off, you know that? You watch all the movies and they’re all like, people endlessly traveling around changing stuff, but in real life? I can only go back to a certain event once. I only get one shot to do this stuff, because these are my friends, and if I miss? They change, and my life changes because their lives did and then I never would have done any of this in the first place. So not only is it frustrating, it’s like advanced calculus trying to figure it all out and now I have a frigging headache. Land in the alley there, by the way.”

“A loop,” Thor said, as the goats came in for a landing in the narrow alley beside the decrepit old YWCA building. It was a ten-story redbrick building with a bunch of boarded-up windows on the upper stories. The long alley wall was a redbrick canvas for graffiti tags. The alley reeked of booze.

“What?”

“From what you say, time is a loop, methinks. Thou mayest travel back to a certain event once, but only once; then the loop needs to be completed, for good or ill; if you set things aright, the loop completes as it did before that villain started changing things, and if you fail, a new loop is created, that doesn’t involve you at all, and you may not enter it. Every loop must be closed.”

“I thought I was the one who’s supposed to say goofy stuff,” Willow said. “Okay, lets go.”

Willow hopped out of the chariot with her handbag and scampered like a jackrabbit to a dirty basement window at the far end of the shadowy alley. Willow knew the lock on that window was always broken. “Back in a sec,” she said, as she opened the window and shimmied inside.

She landed in a crouch in the boiler room. It was strange, being there; she remembered being there, a hundred times before, but she knew she had never actually been there before. The room was small and stuffy and dark, and the air was dusty. It had an industrial smell, like metal and grease. The floor was concrete, and the roof leaked because the showers were just above them. The only sound was the electrical hum of some sort of ancient generator. The room was mostly empty, but Willow could discern the boiler, a tall, cylindrical shape in the dark. She ran toward it, and felt around behind it. It was nearly flush with the wall, so it made an excellent hiding place for Faith’s backpack...Willow smiled, as her searching fingers found the backpack; it was canvas, with buttons all over it for decoration. She yanked it out and opened it up to be certain. She saw Faith’s spare clothes in there: a pair of jeans, two tee-shirts, one blouse, one sweater, underwear and socks.

Tears came to her eyes again, as she remembered all those nights Faith spent in the cold...

“I love you, sweetie,” Willow whispered, as she stood up and ran back to the window. “I’m gonna get you out of this. I promise.”

The room was in the basement level of an office building that was under construction in Boston’s Back Bay, near Copley Square, about six blocks from the YWCA. The building was only partially completed, but the basement level was done, and it provided everything Warren needed: room to work, a good, sturdy pole, a wooden beam that was high enough off the floor and could support Faith’s weight, and privacy. The building was still mostly open to the elements, and even though they were in the basement and the walls there were done, the cold air still found its way down to them. Which was good: Warren wanted Faith to be cold.

He wore a nice, fur-lined parka. He dragged Faith into the dark room by the hair, and flung her to the concrete floor. She was still crying. She laid where he flung her, and sobbed.

The wiring wasn’t in yet, but that didn’t matter. He had his own light. He took a powerful flashlight from his parka, turned it on, and set it on the floor. The room was small and cluttered, dust lingered on every surface, and it smelled like cement and sawdust. There was one dirty little window near the ceiling that looked out on the construction site. Other than that there were crates everywhere, various construction tools lying around, a few big spools of wiring coiled up in the corner, a pair of discarded workmen’s gloves, the remains of someone’s Italian sub, a few newspapers, a leather bullwhip, a metal rod, some rope, including a thick length of rope tied in a hangman’s noose, and a rat. The rat skittered away from the flashlight. As it ran past Faith, it stopped for a second; it looked at her, and seemed to sniff the air. Then it suddenly seemed afraid, and it immediately bolted out of the room.

“Get undressed, Faith,” Warren said. “Let’s see that hot bod. Let’s see how much punishment it can take.”

Faith shook her head. She was still on the floor, sobbing and looking away from him.

“I said fucking get undressed.”

“I wanna...wanna go home,” she whispered, through swollen, bleeding lips.

“You don’t have a home, you fucking whore. Get undressed! This is your Master talking! Take your fucking clothes off!”

Faith shook her head again, and slowly, painfully, got to her feet. She looked at him, then quickly looked away.

“I wanna go home,” she whispered, as she cried. She started walking away, stumbling, feeling her way along the wall.

Faith felt herself shaking, as she slowly stumbled along, looking for a way out. She knew the man would come back, and somehow he would make her do things, and she knew that she didn’t want to do the things. She had begun to realize it in the car; at first everything had been still and quiet, and she felt like she was underwater, under the surface of a still lake, looking up at herself. And she felt paralyzed, and she couldn’t do things until the man told her to. But then she had started to feel bad; she felt herself swimming to the surface of the lake...

“For Christ’s sake,” Warren muttered, and took out the crystal ball again, and put on the glasses with the red lenses. “I don’t believe this. Most girls, a dose of the cerebral dampener’s good for a solid four hours. It hasn’t even been one! Get over here, bitch.”

The man came back. He caught up to her, and grabbed her arm. She wanted to fight him, but she wasn’t sure how to move her arms unless he told her to. She screamed, and feebly tried to push him away, but she couldn’t...she could still hardly move. Part of her still felt like she was waiting...

She thought it should be easy to move her arms...she didn’t understand why they wouldn’t move.

Warren whirled her around, so she was facing him.

“I wanna...I wanna go home,” she whispered again.

“I don’t care,” Warren said...and the crystal flashed again...

Faith wasn’t sure how long she had been lying there, on the floor.

“Gotta hand it to ya Faith, you’re a strong-willed girl.”

She realized she was naked. She remembered taking her clothes off...he had told her to, so she had done it. How long ago was that?

She was hurt...she noticed the pain again. Bad pain, in her head...and her stomach, and her ribs...her mouth. Her teeth hurt...there was blood coming from her mouth...

She couldn’t see anything. The room was dark, with only one small light, but it was shining directly on her and she couldn’t see anything outside it...only a figure, at the edge of the light...the man. Whenever she caught a glimpse of him, the pain came back, like little razors slicing at her...Warren kicked Faith in the face. She screamed, and coughed up blood.

“How many teeth is that now?”

She saw a hand; she shrank away from it. The hand was collecting things from the floor.

“One...two...three...four. Cool. Okay, well, broken ribs, four teeth, lots of bruises...you’re softened up. I guess we can move on to the main event now.”

The man took something out of his pocket; it looked like a wand. He picked up a metal rod from the floor. He pressed a button on the wand, and a white flame leaped out, burning like a rocket; he held it near the tip of the rod for a moment. The tip of the rod glowed red.

The man came toward her. Faith trembled. She wanted to leave, but she couldn’t. She cried...it was all she could do.

“Turn over on your stomach and get that ass up in the air. Slut like you knows the drill. Pretend you’re taking it doggie style.”

Faith did what the man said. She felt her body, doing what he said.

Naked, on her hands and knees, she looked back at the man, trembling. The pain was bad now; it was a constant, like razors and hammers at the same time. The pain in her mouth alone, where she had lost her teeth, made her wince. The pain in her ribs made her whimper every time she moved her back. She noticed her blood, dripping to the floor. It kept filling her mouth up too. She had swallowed it at first, but it hurt whenever she swallowed now, so she just let it dribble out. Her face and her neck and her breasts and her stomach were slick with it. She was on her hands and knees, in a pool of it.

The tip of the rod glowed red. It illuminated the man’s face. His mouth was twisted into an ugly, hateful leer.

“This is gonna hurt,” he said.

“I can’t understand it!” Willow shouted. “Why the fuck isn’t it working?!”

Thor was silent. There was nothing he could say, no way he could help.

They were in the long, narrow alley beside the YWCA. Willow was crouched over her candles and her magic ingredients, trying to figure out where Faith was. But the locator spell wasn’t working...she had tried it five times, and it just wasn’t working. If Faith was dead the locator spell wouldn’t have worked either, but in a specific way that Willow would have recognized. But this...this was like something was interfering with it...

And the goats couldn’t get a scent off Faith’s clothes. Faith had washed them recently, in the YWCA showers. They smelled like soap.

Willow cursed herself for not heading back to some earlier time period first and getting something of Faith’s with her scent on it, but she hadn’t expected this; she wasn’t supposed to even have to find Faith in the first place. She and Thor were supposed to get there before Warren and just wait for him to arrive and that was supposed to be the end of it. But for some reason, the time portal she’d conjured had brought her back at least a couple of hours too late...and Faith had washed her clothes so the goats couldn’t get a scent, and the hairbrush Willow knew Faith always kept in the backpack was a brand new one she had never used yet, and Faith’s deodorant didn’t have enough of a scent either, its fragrance was too strong for the goats to find any of Faith’s scent there. Even the backpack itself didn’t smell like her because she never carried it around; she always left it in the boiler room. It smelled like the boiler room, and soap from all the times she washed her clothes.

But Willow shouldn’t have had to worry about any of that, because she could do a locator spell in two minutes and the locator spell should have worked.

But it wasn’t working, and her time portal had missed its intended destination too, and they were out of options...

She had been searching her memories...the memories she had gotten from Faith. She had all of Faith’s memories, from her earliest recollections, all the way through her eighteenth birthday in November of 1998. She tried to remember where Faith was on this night in 1997...even though Warren was here, and he was changing things, Willow hoped Faith’s memories might give her some clue...

It was a long shot, and a desperate one at that, and she knew it.

But the strange thing was, not only could she not remember where Faith was on this night--January 9th, 1997--she was realizing that Faith had no memory of the first few months of 1997 at all. Willow remembered New Years Eve, and then a snowstorm during the first week of January, and then everything was blank...completely blank. Her next memory of Faith’s after the snowstorm was a strange one: sitting on a park bench on a sunny day in spring, in Copley Square, near the fountain, and not knowing how exactly she had gotten there. And there was a woman, walking away, crying...she only had a glimpse of the woman, in profile, obscured by the bright sun, as the woman ran off. The woman had dark hair. She saw tears running down the woman’s cheek, and she heard her sobbing.

And a moment after that, Faith had put her hand in the pocket of her leather coat, and came out with a wallet that wasn’t hers, that contained no identification, but did have three-hundred dollars in it...

Willow had no idea what the strange memory meant, but she knew it took place no earlier than March and it couldn’t help her: tonight was January ninth.

She was out of options...she didn’t know what to do.

Her magic had never failed her before. She didn’t understand it.

Willow started to cry...

“Willow,” Thor said, softly, and put his hand on her shoulder.

...Then she stopped herself.

“No,” Willow said. “No. I’m not gonna give up. I’m not gonna cry. I’m gonna, gonna think my way out of this...the way Becca taught me. Okay. Okay. Think tactically. Think tactically. Think tactically. Think tactically...”

She stood up, and paced around the alley.

She thought tactically. The goats stamped around and made the snorting sound they always made when they didn’t like what they were smelling. Willow didn’t blame them; the alley smelled like a distillery and she thought there was a good chance she could get drunk there from the fumes alone. Thor stood still, and watched her. She could feel his concern, and see it in the sky above; a dense mass of stormclouds had moved in, blotting out the stars.

He was worried about Faith, but he was worried about Willow too. Willow knew he was worried about what she would do, if she lost Faith...

Once, years before, Willow had lost Faith, for two months. She was gone; one of their enemies, with the aid of a wizard named Cyvus Vail, had imprisoned Faith in an alternate reality, specifically designed to torture her, and destroy her spirit. The trap was so ingenious that no spell could locate her.

Willow killed Vail for that. But Vail was only a mercenary, a wizard for hire. The person who paid Vail was the real culprit. And when Willow finally caught up to him, she used a terrible spell that she had never used before, and never used again: Seven Hells. That spell killed the creature who had hurt Faith, and it did it slowly, torturing him first in seven stages. It took days for him to die.

Willow got Faith back then. And she decided she was going to get her back now.

“Okay,” Willow finally said. “By the numbers. My magic’s on the fritz, who knows why. That gives me two choices. Either I find Faith without magic or I get stronger magic. Finding her without magic won’t work, Boston’s a big town. That leaves option two...”

“Loki,” Thor said.

“Yeah,” Willow said. “I’m just doing cartwheels over here.”

“He can’t travel through time under his own power, due to my Father’s ban. We’ll have to fetch him. Tanngrisnir! Tanngnjóstr!”

The goats looked up at Thor, with an intelligence in their keen eyes far greater than one would presume.

“Fetch Loki here,” Thor said. “Tell him Thor requires his aid.”

“Wait, they can talk?” Willow said.

“No. But Loki knows goat-speech. He’s spent time in every animal shape there is; he knows all their secret languages.”

The goats leaped into the air, happy to be out of the alley. Willow collected her magic supplies and tossed them into her new goblin-skin handbag.

“How long will they take?” Willow said, looking up at the dark gray sky, the wind whipping through her hair. The goats had already vanished into the clouds.

“Perhaps a few minutes,” Thor said. “Depending on where Loki is dawdling at the moment. Not to worry, they’ll find him; they know his scent. They’ve chased him at my bidding often enough.”

They waited. Minutes passed. The air was getting colder, and the wind was picking up. It felt like a snowstorm was coming. Looking up at the iron-gray mass of clouds, Willow knew they just screamed ‘snow’. She estimated snow, and lots of it, would be falling within an hour, if the temperature didn’t drop any further; she guessed eight to twelve inches total. If the temperature did drop, then freezing rain, possibly turning to hail, good-sized hail. She’d become quite the expert on weather in general and storms in particular over the years. Dating Thor did that for you.

“Y’know, maybe we shoulda just summoned the Loki from this time,” she said. “Like, from 1997. He wouldn’t have had to time travel to get here so he could’ve just appeared in like a second.”

“The Loki from this time is currently imprisoned by the Dwarves Brokkr and Eitri,” Thor said. “A year from now I’ll buy his freedom with a hundred head of cattle and a pouch of jewels.”

“Is that the bet he welched on that you were telling me about? The one about which dwarves can forge the most powerful weapons, and Loki wagered his own head because he’s a total ass and then he lost?”

“Aye.”

“Didn’t they sew Loki’s lips shut with wire to get him to stop talking after that?”

Thor smiled. “Aye. That was a peaceful time in Asgard.”

“Brokkr can be pretty nice sometimes,” Willow said. “Like, when me and Tara brought our TV set and our Nintendo Gamecube up to the Dwarf kingdom after Brokkr figured out how to use lightning for electricity, and we all played Mario Party 5 and The Legend of Zelda and just hung out? But then whenever he gets together with Eitri he just turns into a jerk.”

“They’re here,” Thor said, and pointed up to the sky with his corncob pipe, which was actually his massive hammer Mjolnir, but the Viggo Mortensen glamour was still in effect, and Willow thought that since Aragorn smoked a pipe in the Lord of the Rings movies, Viggo should too. In fact Willow thought Viggo should just be Aragorn all the time, and then give her a call.

Reluctantly, she dispelled Thor’s glamour; Loki was here now, and he wouldn’t accept a glamour, so there was no point in disguising Thor. In fact Willow was fairly certain Loki would probably shape-change into something completely outrageous just to freak out anybody who saw them. Loki liked to make an impression.

“Such glum faces!” Loki called down to them from the chariot, and smiled like a wolf in a henhouse.

The man had branded her; she knew that because he had explained it to her. After she had seen the metal rod with the glowing tip in his hand, and he had told her to lie on her stomach and stick her ass up in the air, and then she had felt the searing pain, he explained to her that he had seared his initials into her skin, the way they did with cattle. She cried a little harder, after he said that.

Now he was whipping her.

She was naked, and trembling, and tied to a pole. Every time the whip touched her back, it sliced through her skin, opened her up like a zipper being undone. The beatings had hurt, and the branding had burned, but the whip...Faith had never felt such pain before. She shrieked every time the whip fell, with a crack that echoed through the dark little room and reverberated around, lingering, taking awhile to fade. Her screams couldn’t drown it out. All she did was scream now; she screamed when the whip fell, and when it didn’t. She screamed during those rare moments when she had enough presence of mind to consider and understand her situation, and she screamed when the panic took her, and she couldn’t think any thoughts anymore, and everything was just red.

She saw red behind her eyes, every second now, like fireworks. Every second of pain started out as a feeling but eventually resolved itself into a color: red. She saw red behind her eyes and felt red dripping from her wounds. She was standing in it too: she was standing in a pool of her own blood. It was warm and slippery and she had fallen in it once, ending up down on her knees in it, still tied to the pole, flopping around like a half-dead fish.

He had taken his coat off; he was putting all his strength into the whip and his face was dripping with sweat.

The flashlight was aimed directly at her again. There was a spotlight on her. The flashlight made it all worse, somehow.

The whip tore into her. She shrieked. The crack echoed, lingered. The pain sliced her open, then resolved into red.

The whip tore into her again. She shrieked. The crack echoed, lingered. The pain sliced her open, then resolved into red.

“You’re a star, baby,” the man said.

The whip tore into her again. She shrieked. The crack echoed, lingered. The pain sliced her open...

The crack echoed, lingered. Her screams couldn’t drown it out.

“Your magic is blocked somehow, you say?” Loki said. “Strange.”

“So can you help us or what?” Willow said. “My locator spell can’t reach her, and the goats can’t get a scent. I think something’s blocking the locator spell...I can feel it. It’s not a talisman of Ikonn, I’ve dealt with those before and I can punch through them. It’s something else.”

They were standing outside the alley now, on Berkeley Street, a few blocks from Copley Square. The street was empty, save for them. It had gotten even colder; Willow shivered, as she stood in the snow. Thor wrapped his cape around her.

Loki turned in a slow circle, and sniffed the air. Then he smiled.

“Ah. A Crystal of the Pseudologoi,” he said. “Someone is using one very near to us; I can smell it.”

“Crystal of the Pseudologoi?” Willow said. “I didn’t think there were any more of those! They’re supposed to all be destroyed!”

“I thought so as well, but apparently at least one still remains in this dimension,” Loki said. “The scent is unmistakable.”

“I am not familiar with this crystal,” Thor said.

“Blue in color and very bright, usually fashioned into a necklace or bracelet; it renders the wearer undetectable,” Loki said. “It’s very powerful; no magic but mine is strong enough to break the spell. I traded a chest of the things to some fool wizard nine-thousand years ago because they were cluttering up my trophy room, but I had assumed they were all long gone from Midgard now.”

“It’s gotta be Faith,” Willow said. “Can you find her? Can you take us to her?”

“Aye, witch,” Loki said, and melted, and distorted, and changed...he fell upon his hands and knees, and arched his back, and stretched out; he sprouted black fur, and a tail, and pointed ears, and a snout...and he became a wolf: the greatest, most fearsome wolf that had ever been. Standing on his hind legs he would have been more than twelve feet tall.

“For a price,” the giant wolf growled, and opened its massive jaws, and smiled at Willow; its teeth were razor-sharp fangs.

“Loki, you villain!” Thor bellowed. “An innocent girl needs our aid! Have you no shame?!”

The wind howled, and lightning tore through the sky, and thunder boomed like cannons, and an icy rain fell.

“We don’t have time to argue!” Willow screamed. “Faith could DIE!”

“Then do you accept my terms, witch?” the wolf said. Its voice was a terrible roar, and its mouth smelled like blood.

“No,” Willow said, looking back into the wolf’s green eyes, and trying not to quail. “Y-you’re gonna accept my terms, and here they are. If you get me to Faith before he kills her I’ll, I’ll...do anything you want...as long as it doesn’t involve hurting innocent people.”

“Anything?” the wolf purred, like a dog that had just discovered a tasty new bone.

“Anything,” Willow said.

“Accepted,” the wolf said, and held out a huge paw, which suddenly changed, and became a black, clawed hand...

It held an iron collar.

Willow’s face went pale.

“You said anything, witch,” the wolf snarled. “I’ve wanted you under my yoke for years now. When we find Faith, I shall weld this collar around your neck, and it may never be removed so long as you live, nay, not e’en if mighty Thor himself should try to wrest it free, and you shall swear oaths of fealty to me, in this life and the next, and you shall be my slave forever. Those are my terms.”

“Loki,” Thor said.

“Not so arrogant now, art thou, witch?” the wolf said. “I have thousands of thralls throughout the dimensions, witches and wizards who lusted after my power, and traded their souls to me in exchange. But you shall be the sweetest, my dove; you shall be the most prized. You shall be my greatest treasure. Now, answer me quickly, before Faith dies. Yea or nay? Do you accept my terms? Is Faith so important to you, so beloved, that you will sacrifice yourself to me, forever, in this life and the next, for all eternity, to save her? Wilt thou accept my collar around your neck?”

Willow’s eyes filled with tears.

“Yeah,” she whispered.

“Loki,” Thor said. “Heed my words, brother. If you do this, I will kill you.”

The wolf turned, and growled at Thor, and saliva dripped down its lips.

“Thor...baby, I...” Willow started to say.

Thor held up his hand. Willow stopped talking.

“Look into my eyes, brother,” Thor said, and looked down at the wolf, his gray eyes calm, his face strangely without expression. It frightened Willow...she had never seen him like this before. Thor was hot-tempered, and she had seen him fairly exploding with anger too many times to count. But she had never seen him like this...she had never seen him so cold.

The temperature around them suddenly dropped again, drastically; Willow had never felt so cold. She shivered, and her teeth chattered. The wind stopped howling, the lightning stopped flashing. But the rain kept coming; it was so cold it was actually numbing Willow’s skin. She erected a weak shield to ward it off.

Willow felt like she was standing at the eye of a storm.

“I see them,” the wolf said. “What of it, brother?”

“You know me; you know there is no lie there,” Thor said. “You know I mean what I say. If you attempt to make Willow go through with this, I will kill you: here, now. Your sons, Fenrir and Jormungand, shall not engulf the world, for you shall not be alive to aid them. Ragnarok will not happen as it is meant to. And then the universe shall be undone, and chaos will engulf us all. And I shall care not. I will kill you, and if I kill all of Creation in the bargain, so be it.”

The wolf growled again, but Willow noticed its fur was sticking straight up, and it was shaking a little.

When Willow looked at Thor’s eyes, they scared her; as she watched him, she felt small.

“You shall help us find Faith,” Thor said. “And Willow shall do you one favor, a favor of your choosing, but I must approve of it first. Those are the only terms we are concerned with here, for they are Thor’s terms. You are my brother and I cannot help but love you, no matter what you do to me. But if you do not obey my terms, if you try to hurt this woman I love, Mjolnir shall crush your skull like a grape.”

The wolf roared.

But then the eye of the storm had moved past them, and the thunder had returned, and it roared louder...

He had finished with her. Faith was lying naked and bleeding on the cold concrete floor now, trembling and crying. Every part of her hurt. It even hurt to cry. But he was done hitting her, done whipping her, or so he had said. The light had worn off; she could think again, control her movements again. She could have moved, if she wanted to, tried to run. But she couldn’t get up. She felt broken.

The worst part was the brand, she decided, now that she could think again. He’d seared his initials into her. That was the worst part. She couldn’t see them--they were on her buttocks--but she felt them. They still burned.

But then she heard him pull down his fly. And she knew she hadn’t gotten to the worst part yet...

“Gotta piss, he said. “You just stay right there, hon.”

He pissed on her. She shrieked again: partly from the humiliation, and partly from the new pain: when it came into contact with her wounds, it stung. She tried rolling away, but every time she moved there was another new pain, in her ribs, or her stomach, or her legs, or her back, and it immobilized her.

Finally she curled up into a ball, and cried...

He pissed on her. It was warm and it felt greasy against her skin and itchy in her hair and it smelled putrid. It burned where it touched her wounds. It covered her. It was like the brand, she thought; a brand for every part of her.

She vomited.

He finished pissing on her. She heard his fly zip back up.

Faith laid in her vomit, and her blood, and his piss, and cried, and waited to die.

“First time I went up against you guys?” she heard the man saying. “You were the one who took me down. You called me a loser.”

Faith whispered something. She had meant to shout it but the words came out a whisper; her mouth hurt too much to form the words the right way, and she didn’t really have the energy to say them.

“What?” he said, and crouched down close to her.

“You...are a loser,” she whispered, and looked at him. Her lips trembled, and her face was streaked with tears. But she made herself stop crying. “Fucking... limpdick...has to...hurt girls.”

She tried to spit at him. But she didn’t have the strength to reach him with it, and it ended up dribbling down her chin.

“Famous last words,” Warren said.

He walked to the other end of the room, and picked up the noose. He looped one end of it around a wooden beam, and tied it securely. The end with the noose hung down from it, about seven or eight feet from the floor. He grabbed a crate and positioned it beneath the noose.

“Time to go, hon,” Warren said.

“Fuck...you,” Faith whispered. She tried to move, to stand. The pain was blinding. She managed to get up to her knees, trembling with the exertion, wincing with pain...

There was a flash of light.

She couldn’t move. She was waiting again.

She felt his hands under her arms, dragging her across the floor. He tried to stand her up, but her legs kept buckling.

“Help me, bitch! Stand the fuck up! Get on this crate so I can hang you.”

She tried to stand, because he had told her to.

Together, they got her standing on top of the crate.

He shined the flashlight in her face.

“See this noose? I’m gonna kill you with it. Put it around your neck.”

Faith started to cry again. She shook her head.

“What’s my name?”

Faith shook her head again.

“Master! It’s Master! Fucking say it!”

“No,” Faith whispered.

“Say it, bitch! Fucking say it!

“NO!” Faith managed to scream. It took all her energy, all her strength.

He grabbed her by the hair and wrenched her head around, and looked into her eyes.

“You’re covered in my piss and you’ve got my initials in your ass and I fucking own you, bitch! Who am I? WHO AM I?”

“One dead motherfucker,” Willow said.

“What--” Warren said, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air. He slammed into the far wall. Faith collapsed without him to hold her up, slipped off the crate, and fell to the floor. Thor pulled his cape off of Willow, ran to Faith, and wrapped it around her. Faith started crying again...wailing.

Willow walked across the room, to Warren. Those wailing sounds Faith was making, the smell of piss coming off her, the blood all over her, the way she trembled: all these things awoke something in Willow. Something black, and cold, that she had thought she’d cast off forever, six years before...

She realized now it was still there...down in the depths.

And she knew now exactly what she was going to do to Warren.

Warren was looking toward his jacket; Willow assumed he probably had some weapons in it. He tried to scramble away from her, but then he was suddenly in the air again, suspended three feet off the floor...like he had been hanged.

“W-we...meet again, Superbitch,” he said. But he was trembling, and sweating.

She held her hand up in front of him.

“You had her for a few hours maybe,” Willow said. “I’ve got you for three days. You think you hurt her? I’m gonna teach you what pain is, Warren. I’m gonna show you Seven Hells before you die.”

She closed her fist.

And Warren shrieked, as he felt his skin starting to burn...

“First circle: fire,” Willow said. “You’re burning alive. You’ll burn alive for ten hours. And that’s the easiest circle, Warren. They get harder from there.”

She spit in his face.

He screamed, and screamed, as the fire consumed him, but didn’t kill him...didn’t grant him release...

“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” she said. She spoke very softly. There were tears running down her cheeks. “I took that fucking oath, made that promise to myself. It was selfish. I did it so I could feel good about myself. Meanwhile my friends suffered. No more.”

She suddenly smiled.

“I just had a cool idea,” she said. “I think maybe I’ll go back in time, and kill you every day. Every Warren, from every point in the timeline...every hour of every day...killing you over and over again...”

“Willow,” Thor said.

“Nay, don’t interrupt her,” the wolf said, and licked its lips. “’Tis a captivating speech. He pissed on her, witch. I can smell it. He burned his name into her. The villain deserves all you’ve boasted, and more.”

Willow turned around. She looked at Thor.

She could hear Faith screaming and sobbing, as Thor held her in his arms, wrapped in his cape. Willow knew Faith needed her...

But part of her wanted to stay with Warren, and hurt him some more.

They were two inco