A Stranger In A Strange Land

Untitled Part 6

I was not going to have a sense of smell by the time this was over. That wouldn't be all bad. At least from now on I would be spared the odor from Bucky's gym bag on laundry days. Hell, I wish I didn't have a sense of smell now.

I was reclining in Thor's living room, a cold compress on my head and a line of Vicks above my upper lip. The compress was because of the headache the sulfur and acid fumes had given me. The Vicks had been suggested by the Kronan sitting on the sofa wearing a headset and wielding a game controller. It had been a nice thought, but the eucalyptus aroma wasn't doing shit except making my eyes water even more. I shut them against the glare of the television screen. They had Fortnite on this world. They didn't have that little Greek café that had the best baklava I had ever tasted, and they didn't have doppelgangers of my parents, but they had fucking Fortnite. Go figure.

"Try some water," a glass bumping against my hand accompanied Loki's voice.

"If I swallow anything now, it's coming back up, and if you don't leave me alone, it's coming back up on you," I growled. Ok, he didn't deserve that, but I was not in a good mood, and he was hovering. I hated being henpecked.

"What you need is a little iron to fortify you some more," Thor's cheerful voice following the sound of the kitchen door open, and my stomach curled up into a ball at the smell drifting into the living room in his wake. "Liver?"

"Only if it's yours." I tossed the compress off my face, and was out of the chair and out the door before anyone could react, although I did hear Loki's incredulous voice go "Liver? Really, Brother?"

I made it about a hundred yards before I began pacing.

They had let me check out the other three dwellings. I had found all of the bodies. All of them had been eaten, as well as exsanguinated. Every single drop of blood had been drained from them before they had been carried out of their homes. All of them had been killed by whatever was exuding that disgusting sulfur and acid smell. All of them had been dumped on the cliffs by the sea, and I lost the scent of the culprit at each and every site right at the water's edge.

It hadn't been just three more bodies, it'd been five. One of them was a kid.

And I'd been unable to track down his killer. I felt fucking useless.

I paced, wanting to hit something, wanting to hunt down whatever this was, and annihilate it. I was not a violent person. I hated fighting, I hated killing anything. Hell, when I had a small kitchen garden at my home on my Earth, I would plant marigolds to keep the beetles away from my tomatoes instead of using more lethal means to do pest control. I would scoop spiders up in coffee mugs and take them outside rather than using a shoe. The only reason I hadn't been vegan was because I had been anemic and I had landed in the emergency room after the one time I tried it. To this very day, I had to be all but bribed into going to the gym at Avengers HQ to practice my fighting forms. Bucky had promised to invite me over to watch the new Godzilla movie the last time, while Steve's "reward" was a pinky swear to pick up the phone and call the next time he needed a file on whoever the Villian of the Week was instead of rummaging through my computer and accidentally deleting software I'd spent days working on.

But at this moment, I had an overwhelming urge to hunt this monster down and do what I could to destroy it. Oh, there was no way I'd be able to. Whatever it was would kill me first, but hot damn I wanted to try. Only we needed to find it first, and I was no help.

I felt company approaching before I heard him. I should have known he wouldn't just let me storm off like that. I sat down on some lawn furniture someone had left out. Loki sat down in the other chair. "He really should have known you needed no 'fortifying'."