Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

to him and drag him back but he was almost as strong as Wally, and I was crying and begging him, ‘Don’t leave, Daddy, please don’t leave!’ and I was terrified, terrified that she’d finally driven him away and that I wouldn’t ever see him again—”

“Ziss is outrageous!” said Hnossi, her red-gray pockmarks glowing like campfire coals. “Zat’s not how it happent at all! She vuss a childt! She doesn’t remember how it happent—”

“Hnossi, please,” I said, forming my hands into a time-out T. “We all have our own truths—”

“Ach, vut sheisen you peddle!”

“Please don’t interrupt. You’ll have your turn. Inga, go on.”

“And so Daddy’s gone and I’m on the floor sobbing, and like, two seconds go by and then her comm goes off, for Ymir’s sake, and then she’s all, ‘I’ve gotta go fight the Gorgon Legion or some ice giants or whatever and you’re in charge of your little brother until I get back’ and boom—she’s gone, just like that!

“So she’s gone and Daddy’s gone and Baldur and I are alone all night and all the next day and for the next two fucking days and nights after that,” said Inga, plucking at her tight black long-sleeved shirt as if she were rehearsing ripping the skin and flesh from her skeleton. “I was twelve, Mother! Twelve!”

“You vere a bik girl, you vere oldt enough—people were goingk to be killt unless—”

“Unless you personally went and did your heroine-thing because it’s not like you ever said no even though there were a hundred other F*O*O*Jsters who could’ve—”

“None viss my powers, experience, knowletch—”

“Sure, right, because it’s all about proving how you’re the toughest bitch who ever lived, that you don’t need anyone and no one’s better than you and that you have no weaknesses, not even a husband who couldn’t take your shit anymore so he left you or two scared little kids you abandoned at home that you could never wait to escape at the very first buzz on your wrist—”

“People neetet me! How can you not unterstant zat?”

“We needed you, Mother!” screamed Inga, sobbing. “I needed you!”

I cut in: “So what did you do, Inga?”

“I was so tired…of being scared. And lonely. And then all of a sudden I just felt this, this surge of power, of bravery, like nothing I’d ever felt before. Totally, one hundred percent determined—the ‘will to power,’ Mother always called it—like I was drunk or stoned or on fire. I knew where Mother kept all her magical implements, the stuff we were never supposed to go near, and I knew the spell to open the lock. I took Jörmungandrstooth, this seidr blade she had at the bottom…and I invoked the name of Ymir…and then I, I just—”

Her lips shut. Her eyes shut. She mimed a fast motion over her wrist, eight times in total.

Her eyes opened, ablaze from reliving her truth. “And then my soul was ripped out of me,” she said, “and sucked right down into the depths of Niflheim and into the hands of Hel.”

And Hnossi, despite her reputation for never crying, who only two weeks before had sat across from me at Soup ’n’ Heroes crying iron-ingot tears, sat upright in her hospital bed, seeping not liquid metal, but tears of pale, ordinary water.

“I came home,” said Hnossi in a weakened voice, then, shattering, “as soon as Odin’s ravens fount me, tolt me vut you’t done to yourself. I fought my vay srough ze ice hordes of Niflheim unt zen against Hel herself to get you beck! Do you not remember ziss? I risked my life to safe you—”

“And what did you do the very next morning after you brought me back, Mother?” said Inga with sufficient acid to burn her mother’s swords.

Silenced, Hnossi simply stared at her daughter with perfect vulnerability, that of the accused who’d just surrendered checkmate evidence to the tribunal, and who’d glimpsed the approach of the executioner.

“You went back to work,” said Inga, her smile awful and vicious with irony. “You spent nine days in the netherworlds slicing the icicles off frost giants, but for your weak, stupid daughter who tried to kill herself out of loneliness, you could not sit for one lousy fucking day.

“After almost losing me forever, you went back to work.”

Inga waited for her mother to speak.

Finally: “Nothing to say, woman?”

Everything was charged with emotion—even Inga’s darkened mane and Hnossi’s pale green tufts were puffed up, hairs splitting at their ends and vibrating in the tingling air.

“Inka,” rasped Hnossi, “I’m…I—”

“Don’t say it!” yelled Inga. “Whatever you’re gonna say, it’ll be all fucking wrong anyway, so just don’t!” She stepped across to Hnossi’s bedside, leaned down, and yelled some more, and the highly vincible goddess shriveled like a weed sprayed with herbicide.

“And don’t call me ‘Inga’ anymore! Inga died that day in 1974 because your neglect killed her! So you can stop wondering—assuming you ever did—why my official bio and F*O*O*J file say I was born that day, the day I left you and Daddy left you and Baldur left you! All you have to know, Hnossi, is that on that day I gave birth to myself!”

SNAP!—It was a sound like a whip cracking, and Syndi reared back and slammed against the wall, clutching her cheek. White smoke leaked between her fingers. I reached for her but stopped at the sight of electrical firecrackers exploding all over Hnossi’s face and arms and above the white blanket covering her torso.

“Stand back, Syndi!” I shouted, just as all the medical equipment shorted out in sparking mechanical death cries. My nostrils clogged with a burning stench. The air tasted like metal. “Doctor! Nurse!” I yelled out into the hall. “Code blue!”

The goddess who’d almost never cried, cried out her agony.

“Mummy!” said Syndi, releasing the burn wound and rushing forward to clutch her agonized mother. I tackled her before she could electrocute herself, knocking her against the wall beside the headboard and bouncing the two of us to the floor.

Her mother continued keening like an animal in