Chapter 3: One Honest Act
His plan, as far as you can tell, has nineteen steps, and he refuses to tell you any of them.
"Plausible deniability," he says, when you corner him in the back room. He's sitting at your aunt's old rolltop desk surrounded by printouts from the city's property database, which he has apparently taught himself to navigate in a single night, and a legal pad covered in handwriting so small and so spiky it looks like barbed wire. "If you know the plan, you become an accomplice. If you don't, you're merely a bystander with excellent taste in staff."
"Is any of it illegal?"
"Define illegal."
"Loki."
"Most of it is legal." He turns a page. "Some of it is a sort of legal-adjacent performance art. One step involves Mrs. Gutierrez, and I won't apologize for that, she volunteered."
The development company is called Harrowgate Holdings. You look it up. It has a website made entirely of stock photos of smiling people in hard hats, a CEO with a jawline like a cinderblock, and a portfolio of eleven Brooklyn buildings it has "reimagined," which as far as you can tell means "knocked down and replaced with glass boxes where a one-bedroom costs more than your aunt paid for the whole shop."
You spend the first week in a kind of numb fog, pricing storage units for forty thousand books and lying awake doing math that never works out. He spends it vanishing. He's out of the shop for hours at a time. He comes back with ink on his fingers and dirt on his good shoes and a look in his eye that you remember, with a chill, from the news footage.
He still brings your tea at three o'clock. Every day. Even the day he comes back with a black eye and refuses to say how he got it.
"Did someone punch you?"
"A misunderstanding with a city clerk."
"A city clerk punched you?"
"She was very committed to the integrity of the filing system." He sets the tea down by your elbow. "I respected her enormously."
The hearing is on a Wednesday night in the basement of a church on Sixth Avenue, under fluorescent lights that make everyone look embalmed. Community Board Six, Land Use Committee. Harrowgate needs a variance to go two stories higher than zoning allows, and they need the board to sign off on it, and apparently, Loki says, the board has to listen to the public first.
"That's it?" you'd said. "That's your plan? Public comment?"
"That," he'd said, adjusting his scarf in the shop window, "is step nineteen."
You've never seen so many people in a church basement. The book club takes up the entire front row, all six of them, Mrs. Gutierrez with a sign that says HANDS OFF OUR BOOKS in glitter glue. Behind them is the woman who comes in every Saturday to report on her Jane Eyre progress. The man in the cardigan who bought the four-dollar Agatha Christie, who turns out to be a retired architectural historian, and who has brought a binder. The girl with forty thousand followers is in the aisle, filming, and behind her, packed in along the back wall and spilling out into the stairwell, are what must be a hundred and fifty of the people who've stood in your Saturday line since the video went around.
You stand at the back with your arms wrapped around yourself and can't speak.
Harrowgate's lawyer goes first. He's very smooth. He talks about housing need, and economic revitalization, and the "underutilized commercial footprint." The CEO with the cinderblock jaw sits beside him nodding.
Then the architectural historian stands up with his binder and spends eleven extremely boring minutes explaining that the cornice on your building is original 1891 pressed tin, one of three surviving examples of its kind in Park Slope, and that the building was flagged for landmark review in 1987 and the review was never completed, which means, technically, legally, it's still pending.
You turn very slowly to look at the end of the row where Loki is standing.
He doesn't look at you. But the corner of his mouth moves.
The lawyer stops looking smooth. The board members start whispering. Mrs. Gutierrez gets up and talks for four minutes about Hector's posture, which seems to be her contribution to the plan, and the board chair is so baffled she lets her finish.
And then Loki walks to the microphone.
He doesn't have to. You realize that as you watch him go. The historian's binder did the work. The landmark review will hold up the demolition for months, maybe years, and there's nothing more he needs to say. But he walks down the center aisle of that church basement anyway, in his black suit and his green scarf, and stands at the cheap folding podium, and puts his hands on either side of it.
"My name," he says, "is Loki."
The room goes still.
It's not a gradual quiet. It's instant, the kind of silence that comes when a crowd collectively stops breathing. Two board members actually lean back in their chairs. Somebody near the back says a word you're not allowed to say in churches. The girl in the aisle lowers her phone, then very quickly raises it again.
You know what he looks like to them. You know what you're all thinking of. The sky over 42nd Street. The things with too many teeth. You were in a subway tunnel for three hours while the ceiling shook and you didn't know if you'd see daylight again, and so was half this room, or their brother, or their wife.
His hands are white-knuckled on the podium.
"Some of you will know me," he says. "Most of you will remember. I came to this city two years ago and tried to make it kneel. People died. People you knew, some of you. I told myself it was what I was owed. That I was born to rule and you were born to be ruled, and that I would be doing you a kindness." He looks out at the room. His voice is very level. "I was wrong. I'm not saying that because I have anything to gain. There's nothing I can gain here. I'm saying it because it's true, and because I've been working in a bookshop on Seventh Avenue for three months, and in three months more people in this city have been kind to me than I deserve in three lifetimes."
Nobody moves.
"The woman who owns that bookshop," he says, "gave me a job when nobody else would. She tried to fire me on the first day, and frankly she should have. She didn't. She let me stay. She let me read to her book club and insult her customers and reorganize her shelves according to a system she still doesn't understand. When she found out I couldn't sleep, she started leaving the lights on in the back room. She never told me she'd done it. I noticed anyway." His voice catches, just slightly. "That shop is the only place in nine realms where I've ever been allowed to be useful without being feared. Please don't let them knock it down. Not for me. I'm not asking for me. I'm asking for her."
He steps back from the microphone.
For a long, terrible second, nobody does anything.
Then Mrs. Gutierrez stands up and starts clapping. Mr. Feld, who is ninety-one and needs a cane, gets to his feet beside her. The Jane Eyre woman. The cardigan man. The girl with the camera. And then the back wall, the whole Saturday line, all hundred and fifty of them, until the church basement is so loud with it you can feel the floor shaking under your boots in a way that isn't anything like a subway tunnel at all.
That's when you see his hands.
He's walking back up the aisle, head down, not looking at anyone, and his hands are hanging at his sides, and there's light coming off them. Faint. Green. Like sunlight through leaves. It's curling around his fingers in thin bright threads, and he doesn't seem to notice, and then he does.
He stops dead in the aisle. He lifts one hand and stares at it.
The green light flares. It climbs up his wrist and over his knuckles like ivy, and he makes a sound you've never heard from him, a sound like someone hit in the chest, and he looks up, across the whole roaring room, straight at you.
You find him on the church steps afterward, in the cold, under a streetlight. The crowd's gone. The board has tabled the variance pending landmark review. Harrowgate's lawyer left without speaking to anyone.
He's sitting on the top step with his elbows on his knees, holding a small green flame in his cupped palms, staring at it.
You sit beside him. Close. Shoulder to shoulder.
"One honest act," you say. "Freely. With nothing to gain."
"I didn't plan it." He sounds stunned. "Every step of it was planned. The historian, the filings, the clerk. I was going to win. I was going to save your shop and get my magic back and go home with a story about how clever I'd been. And then I stood at that microphone and the plan was finished and I just..." He closes his fingers over the flame. Opens them again. It's still there. "I didn't scheme it. It's the only thing I haven't schemed since I got here."
"That's not true," you say.
He looks at you.
"The tea," you say. "Every day at three. You never schemed the tea."
He laughs, low and broken, and drops his head.
"You can go home now," you say. Your chest hurts saying it. "Right? Your magic's back. Your mother's garden. That's the deal."
"That's the deal."
"So go." You look at the street. At the bodega across the way, the light still on. "I'll be fine. I've got a landmark review and four million views and a book club of extremely dangerous senior citizens. I'll be great."
For a long moment, he doesn't say anything. Then he closes his hand, and the green flame goes out, and he turns on the step to face you.
"I lied to you," he says. "On the first day. About the contract."
"I know. The book-burning clause."
"No. The clause was real. But I wrote the contract the night before. I'd gone to six other places with Thor and been fired from all of them, and each time I'd thought, good, let them, I don't care. And then I walked into your shop and you told my brother to drip by the umbrella stand." His eyes are very green in the streetlight. "And you looked at me like I was an inconvenience instead of a monster. And I thought, I'm not leaving here. I'll make sure of it. I'll write a contract she can never get out of. I'll be the worst employee in Brooklyn and she'll never be able to fire me, and I'll stay."
You stare at him.
"I wasn't trying to stay in Midgard," he says. "I was trying to stay with you. I've been in love with you since the umbrella stand. It's ridiculous, and it's true, and I've told you now, so you can..."
You kiss him.
His mouth is cold, like his fingers, for about half a second, and then it isn't. He makes a startled sound against your lips and then his hand comes up into your hair, and he kisses you back like a man who's spent a thousand years being careful and has just decided not to bother anymore. He tastes like the Earl Grey he always pretends not to drink. Somewhere above you the streetlight flickers green, then gold, then green again, and you feel him laugh into your mouth at it.
When you finally pull back, his forehead stays against yours.
"Your mother's garden," you whisper.
"Will be there in a week," he says. "Or a month. I can visit. I can do anything now, darling. I'm a god again." His thumb strokes your jaw. "But tomorrow's Thursday. The book club's reading Jane Eyre, and Mrs. Gutierrez has strong opinions about Mr. Rochester, and somebody has to defend him."
"You're going to defend Rochester? He locked his wife in an attic."
"He had a complicated family situation," says the god of lies, gravely. "I relate to him enormously."
You laugh, and he kisses you again, quick and soft, and then stands and holds out his hand to pull you up off the cold church steps. When you take it, his fingers are warm for the first time since you've known him.
"One more thing," he says, as you walk back toward Seventh Avenue together, his arm around your shoulders, his scarf somehow around your neck now instead of his.
"What?"
"Now that I'm a hero of the community," says Loki, "I'd like to discuss a raise."